JUN]4 A»^' 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

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Chap.}:...... Copyright No. 

Shelf...B^.4 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



TEACHING 



AS A BUSINESS 



FOUR ADDRESSES 



BY 



V-- 



C.W. BARDEEN 



EDITOr OF THE SCHOOL BULLETIX 




,V^>( OF CO^©;i, ^ 
yVf \Ct Of ^<^" 

NOV 1^.1897 

SYRACUSE, ^^^^/jr^^, ,^ CoOf ^ ' 

C. W. BARDEEN, PUBLISHER" 

1897 

4:WA^F1ES RECEIVED 

3. W. ^ardeen 



Copyright, 1897, by C, 



%i.^.^ 



\ \:>ir\ 



B^'^l'- 



^957 



Of these addresses, two were delivered before the 
New York State Teachers' Association, one before 
the National Educational Association, and one be- 
fore the American Institute of Instruction. As the 
pamphlet editions of the first three printed at the 
time have been exhausted and there is still occa- 
sional demand for them, I have thought it might 
not be presumptuous to put the four together in 
more permanent form as illustrating a phase of 
teaching not commonly dwelt upon but of consider- 
able importance. 

Syracuse, N. Y., Aug. ^8, 1897. 



(5) 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

The Teacher as he Should Be - - 9 

(New York State Teachers' Association, Sara- 
toga Springs, July 8, 1891). 
Teaching as a Business for Men - - 37 
(National Educational Association, July 17, 
1885). 

The Teacher's Commercial Value - - 67 
(New York State Teachers' Association, Sara- 
toga Springs, July 9, 1885). 
Fitting Teachers to Places - - - 101 
(American Institute of Instruction, Montreal, 
July 12, 1897). 

Index 149 



(7) 



THE TEACHER AS HE SHOULD BE 



My earliest ideas of art are connected with a pic- 
ture in the advertising columns of the weekly news- 
paper. It represented two men : one lean and lank 
and decrepit, walking about to save funeral ex- 
penses, and labelled "Before taking"; the other 
blooming with full vigor of manhood, and labelled 
" After taking ". Dr. Andrews has shown you the 
teacher " before taking " ; I am to show you the 
other one. 

A careful compilation of the characteristics as- 
cribed to the Ideal Teacher in previous addresses 
upon the subject shows that he must be affable, be- 
nignant, courteous, decorous, exact, fervent, genteel, 
humorous, immaculate, judicious, keen, lenient, 
modest, neat, orderly, prompt, quiet, robust, schol- 
arly, tranquil, ubiquitous, vigilant, wary, 'xem- 
plary, youthful, and zealous. My subject, therefore, 
naturally divides itself into twenty-seven heads : 
the twenty-six which I have mentioned — and which 

(9) 



10 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

I will omit ; and a twenty -seventh, which is that he 
should be a ^h\u. 

For after all, that is about all there is of it. A 
person may have every one of these twenty-six 
characteristics and yet be a poor stick of a teacher. 
He may lack them all, and yet be the one great 
force for good in the lives of his pupils. '^During 
the war when things looked dark and Artemus 
Ward was discouraged, he spoke a little })iece on 
specialties. He said John Adams's specialty was 
so-and-so, and Thomas Jefferson's was this, and Alex- 
ander Hamilton's was that ; but George "Washing- 
ton's specialty consisted in not having any body at 
the present day resemble him to any alarming de- 
gree. It is this quality of pre-eminence, — of a per- 
sonality which dominates and compels recognition, 
that marks the ideal teacher. He never deserves 
the name unless his pujjils say of him reverently, 
" He was a man, take him for all in all, 
I shall not look upon his like again." 

Suppose we appl}' the inductive method. Let us 
select four of the recognized great teachers of recent 
generations, and see what qualities they had in 
common. 

There will be no dispute as to whose name should 



THE TEACHER AS HE SHOULD BE 11 

head tlio list. With Thomas Arnold let lis associ- 
ate Edward Thring, Emma Willard, and Mark 
Hopkins. The eminence of these teachers is estab- 
lished. I suppose if there were a vacant position 
on the institute corps Judge Draper would consider 
any one of them an eligible candidate. Language 
can go no further. 

But w^hen we apply to them our twenty-six adjec- 
•' tives we are perplexed. For one thing, none of 
them were great scholars. Edward Thring and 
Mark Hopkins were not even bookish in their tastes, 
but read marvellously little for men of their station. 
As for professional reading, they never thought of 
it. Not one of the four could pass a teachers'-class 
examination in methods, as laid down in DeGraff's 
"School Room Guide". 

Time will not permit me to analyze at length the 
characters of all of them ; but suppose we look for a 
moment at one who ranks well with the rest, and 
whose name is just now much mentioned in a 
neighboring city. We shall find that Emma Wil- 
lard lacked a great mau}^ things that school com- 
missioners deem essential to a first-grade certificate. 

A teacher ought to have a " professional spirit ". 
Had Mrs. Willard ? No : when she began teaching 



12 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

her solo object was to assist lier husband in his 
l)ecu]iiary affairs, and she did not do a great amount 
of personal teaching after she got money enough 
together to hire others to do it. 

A teacher should be absorbed in her work, most 
critics tell us. Was Mrs. Willard ? She writes from 
Middlebury : "I go to school generally before nine 
and stay till one ; come home, snatch my dinner, 
go again, and stay till almost sundown ; come home 
and dress in a great hurry to go abroad ; get home 
about ten, fatigued enough to go to bed, and lie till 
seven the next morning, with hardly time enough 
to mend my stockings." 

A teacher ought to be free from vanity. Was 
Emma Willard ? No : she was one of the vainest 
women that ever lived. She went to a museum in 
Paris. In her own words : "I told them I was con- 
nected with an establishment for female education, 
or in other words was a school-mistress ; and I dare 
say I gave them to understand, though I cannot 
tell in exactly wliat form of words, that I thought 
I was a pretty good one, too." 

Gen. Lafayette had enjoyed his reception by her 
young ladies, and paid her much attention in 
France. To her he was therefore not only the great 



THE tea('hp:r as he should be 13 

man of Europe, but iu her own words " the acknowl- 
edged father of my country", — which shows what 
an oversight it was on Washington's part to die 
before he visited Troy. She made one of Gen. 
Lafayette's party to the opera, and as they went out 
the crowd made respectful passage for them. " I 
can ^scarcely describe my own feelings," she writes ; 
" I was with him wliom from my infancy 1 had ven- 
erated as the best of men ; whom for a long period 
of my life I had never hoped even to see in this 
world. Now I read with him his noble history in 
the melting eyes of his ardent nation. And I saw 
tliat he was regarded as he is, the father of France 
— aye, and of America too. America ! my own 
loved land ! It was for her sake I was thus 
honored, and it was for me to feel her share in the 
common emotion. My spirit seemed to dilate, and 
for a moment, self-personified as the genius of my 
country, I enjoyed to the full his triumph, who is 
at once her father, and her adopted son." 

She used to write letters to the great men of the 
time, — Webster, Clay, Benton, the presidents, and 
so on, — whether she knew them or not, and whether 
the letters were answered or not. She began a 
letter to Abraham Lincoln thus : " Dear sir : Pre- 



14 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

sumiug I am known to you as a writer of my 
countrj^'s history, and having just heard that the 
great cares which weigh upon you begin to tell 
upon 3^our physical health, I determined to write to 
you my high approval of your general course and 
leading measures." 

We regret that, in tlie language of her biographer, 
he was too preoccupied to reply. 

She was equally unlimited in her choice of topics. 
A gentleman was asked what was the specialty of a 
certain man of scientific pretensions. " In these 
days," was the careful reply, " a scientist's specialty 
must be very narrow. It must be not all natural 
history, but zoology ; not all zoology but insects ; 
not all insects, but diptera ; not all diptera, but the 
flea, and so on. Now Mr. Blank's specialty is 
omniscience." 

So it might be said of Mrs. Willard that her 
specialty was omniscience. She knew a good deal 
about female education but she was just as ready to 
pronounce authoritative opinions upon any other 
subject. During the war she published a pamphlet 
on the negro, pointing out that God had made him 
black so that his place as servant in the family 
should be unmistakably settled, all jealous heart- 



THE TEACHER AS HE SHOITLD BE 15 

burnings and vain expectations spared, and a per- 
manent order in the household established. She 
strode into the medical field, and invented a theory 
of circulation and respiration that was solemnly 
endorsed in 1851 by this Association. Under this 
doctrine a consumptive in the last .stages had only to 
throw open a window and inhale deep draughts of 
winter air, and all would be well — a simpler cure 
than Dr. Koch's and perhaps no shorter-lived. 

I could occupy all my time telling of the foolish 
things Emma Willard did in her long and busy 
life. So I could pick a handful of pebbles from a 
fallow meadow, and show them to you as speci- 
mens of the soil. Emma Willard could afford to do 
foolish things ; for she was a great woman, and in 
the light of her noble character and her inestimable 
services to her sex these defects sink into insignifi- 
cance. 

I am a hero-worshiper. I want to die long before 
I cease to believe, I do not say in goodness and in 
greatness, but in good men and great men. It is 
the curse of this generation that in the same 
breath we say of a scoundrel, " well, I dare say 
the rest of us are just as bad if we were only found 
out ; " and of a noble champion of God's truth, 



16 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

" He knows on which side his bread is buttered." 
Coleridge said his IVIephistopheles was to have made 
all things vain and nothing worth by a perpetual col- 
lation of the great with the little in the presence of 
the infinite. Of all that an evil spirit denies, we 
lose most as we are pervaded b}^ his denial of dis- 
tinction in the motives of human action. 

But ni}^ hero-worship is not panegyric. If you 
tell me that Thomas Arnold had no faults, you do 
not raise my opinion of him, but you show me that 
you lack information and judgment. All men 
have faults, and great men are sure to have marked 
faults. It is a sign of a great man that he can 
afford to have faults, and of a clear mind to see the 
faults only in perspective. 

Let me illustrate. 

The great man in my own experience as a pupil, 
the only teacher out of the hundred I had who left 
in me a recognized uplifting of my whole nature 
through his personality, knew less about mathe- 
matics than I do about the next world ; for I know 
that I know nothing about the next world, and he 
never found out that he knew nothing about algebra. 
I remember vividly a typical recitation. The class 
had stumbled over the proof that a°=:l. So he 



THE TEACHER AS HE SHOULD BE 17 

went to the board to help us out. Chalk in hand 
he began bravely: "a^^r". A pause, a turn to 
the side of his shaggy locks : '■ =a*' ". A further 
pause, and then below : " a^^ " ; and then f[uiekly : 
"— ao. So you see a^=l. Next." A whisk of 
the eraser, and he slunk back to his seat and went 
on \yith the lesson. 

Now there is in combination every possible fault 
in a recitation. As an educated man he ought to 
have been able to demonstrate that a^=l anywhere 
and at any time. I could do it myself, though I 
haven't taught school in twenty years. 

Then if he was going to teach algebra at all, he 
ought to have prepared his lesson. He might at 
least have committed the demonstration to memory. 

In fact if you as a young commissioner were to 
judge him by that recitation you would not have 
granted him a tliird-grade certificate. You would 
have told liim that the quicker he got out of the 
school-room and into some legitimate business for 
which he had reasonable adaptation, the better. 
And yet that man w^as head and shoulders the best 
teacher I ever had. He knew less than nothing 
about mathematics, but ( ) what a Greek scholar he 
was ! His boys went down to Yale fully abreast in 



18 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

technicalities of Uncle Sam's Andover pets, and in 
critical appreciation way beyond them. It was an 
inspiration to recite to him in Homer. There we 
saw him at his best, for he loved the language and 
all the lines. Unconsciously he lavished upon us 
there the earnestness, the simplicity, the depth, and 
the richness of his character. No boy ever grad- 
uated under William Hutchison without a loftier 
ideal of what it was to be a man. 

We never thought he was without faults, but 
what did we care for them ? His algebra recitations 
were ridiculous ; but think what a glorious old 
fellow he must have been that he could every day 
go througli such fatuous performances and not a 
boy in the room think less of him. 

Now understand me, I do not mean that a man 
is ever greater on account of his faults. Mr. Hutch- 
ison would have been a better teacher, and 1 
should be to-day a better scholar if he had either 
mastered mathematics or refused to teach it. But 
that one weakness of his stood out against such a 
wealth of strength that it was simply funny to us 
from its incongruity. 

I want to emphasize this, for it is the underlying 
point of this address. Teachers are judged too 



THE TEACHER AS HE SHOULD BE 19 

much by characteristics, too little by character. 

You come to me for a teacher, and I say, " Well, 
here is a capital man in most ways, but he lacks 
tact." Like a flash you reply, " That settles it ; 
tact is indispensable." 

Is it ? That depends on the man. Thomas 
Arnold had no tact ; Edward Thring abounded in 
the lack of it : so if all men had been of your mind 
England would have missed the two greatest teach- 
ers she ever knew. 

In fact specification of non-essentials is the rock 
upon which many a school-board splits. A com- 
mittee come to me and say : " We want a principal, 
both normal and college graduate ; not less than 25 
or more than 30 years old ; rather tall, and weigh- 
ing from 150 to 175 pounds ; married, with an 
agreeable wife and two or three children ; who has 
had experience in a school under the Regents, holds 
a State certificate by examination, and can show 
that in every school where he has taught he has 
increased the foreign attendance." 

" And what will you pay ? " I ask. 

'' AVell if he just suits us, we will give him seven 
hundred and fifty dollars." 

One is reminded of the dignified but seedy in- 



20 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

dividual who entered a cheap restaurant, took off 
his gloves, hung his hat and overcoat upon the 
hooks, dusted the chair, brushed the crumbs from 
the table-cloth, and then addressed the waiter as 
follows : 

" If you have just the right kind of oysters in just 
the right condition, please take half a pint of small 
ones (not too small you know), and strain the juice 
off of them carefully, leaving just a little juice on 
them ; put them in a pan which has been scoured 
and dried, and then add a little butter (good, pure 
butter), and a little milk (not New York milk, but 
real cow's milk), and then place the pan over a 
coal-fire, being careful to keep the pan in motion so 
as not to let the oysters or milk burn ; add a little 
juice if you choose, and then watch the pan closely 
so that the exact moment it comes to boil you can 
whip it off. At the same time have a deep dish 
warming near at hand, and when you see the firs^j 
sign of boiling empty the pan into the dish. Dc 
you think you can remember that ? " 

And the waiter, who had listened respectfully, 
called wearily down into the kitchen, " One stew ! " 

So the school board that goes so much into detail 
in prescribing qualifications will find in the end that 
it has secured one stick, 



THE TEACHER AS HE SHOULD BE 21 

The worst of it is, trustees are often the most 
strenuous about the least important. X committee 
says : 

" We want an intermediate teacher : normal grad- 
uate ; between 22 and 26 years old ; rather impos- 
ing in height ; dressing neatly but not showily, with 
preference for dark colors ; at least four years' 
experience, the last half in graded schools ; who 
can play the organ for marching, has read oc- 
casional papers at county associations, and attends 
the Free- Will Baptist church. Salary seven dollars 
a week." 

"And if you can't get (juitc all these things?" 
"Well she must be a Free- Will Baptist." 
You remember the "perplexity of the boy who as 
he grew up was astonished to learn that our Saviour 
was born a Jew. He said he had alwaj^s supposed 
God was a Presbyterian. 

It is most exasperating when these narrow critics 
pride themselves on rejecting a teacher for some 
trivial defect. They have found that he is a noble 
christian man, of long and successful experience, 
and they cast him aside because in wanting of pun- 
ishment he spells corporal with an e. Now it is a 
fault not to spell well ; so far as it goes it counts 



22 TEACHIXG AS A BUSINESS 

against a teacher, decidedl>\ But the woods are 
full of teachers 

Who never wrote a misspelled word 
Nor ever said a wise one. 

It makes a difference whether the word is spelled 
correctly, but it makes more difference what the 
word is and what it means. Suppose I am on the 
point of purchasing Judge Hilton's park at Sara- 
toga. By a reversal of conditions I have become 
wealthy and he — an editor. The place seems to 
suit me ; he wants to sell and I want to buy. I 
drive out there and as I pass through the gate I see 
a cobble-stone lying in the middle of the roadway. 
" That's enough for me," I say ; " turn around and 
drive back to the hotel. I don't want any country- 
place so poorly taken care of that the roadways are 
sprinkled with cobble-stones." 

Ridiculous, isn't it? AVcll is it not just as ridicu- 
lous to reject a man finally and solely because 
he spells separate with three e's ? The road ought 
not to have cobble-stones in it, Init will it not be 
better to drive around the rest of the place and 
see whether the cobble-stone is typical or excep- 
tional ? The teacher ouglit not to misspell separate, 
but will it not be better to look further and see 



THE TEACHER AS HE SHOULD BE 23 

whether this bhinder is characteristic, or whether it 
is an exception that proves the rule ? 

A few weeks ago I recommended to one of the 
best superintendents I know, a lady whom I pro- 
nounced exceptionally fitted to fill a responsible 
position. He liked what I said of her and what 
she said of herself in a letter of application ; but 
in an accompanying page giving an outline of her 
experience, she had written : 

''Born , June 21, 1862. 

Graduated from , 1883. 

Taught , 1883-1886," etc. 

He showed me this sheet and said it astonished 
him to find a teacher generally well-educated who 
would end these statements with periods. They 
were parts of one sentence, and should have been 
separated by semicolons. In fact this seemed to 
him so unpardonable a blunder that though in his 
search for a teacher he passed through the village 
where she was employed, he would not stop to see 
her. Think of it ! One of the noblest women that 
man ever left unmarried, with a record of un- 
broken and progressive success as a teacher : and he 
would not stop to see her because it was her judg- 
ment to use periods where it was his to use semi- 
colons ! 



24 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

1 rcmeinber years ago a story tlie principal told 
us of a c'lassmato since risen to eminence ; a teacher 
who in his early days was on the point of engage- 
ment where he lost the i)lace in this way. The 
trustees liad met to elect him, and were waiting 
for a ninth meml)er to come that the vote might be 
unanimous. Tlie clerk happened to remember that 
he had received a letter asking some trifling ques- 
tion of detail as to the household arrangements, 
in which tlie teacher explained in a bashful way 
that this interested liim as he was about " se mw- 
bere'\ That finished him. The chairman smiled 
a suj)erior smile as iie remarked that a man who 
did not know enougli of Latin customs and the 
Latin language to be aware that it was the bride 
who veiled herself and not the bridegroom, would 

not be needed as principal of Academy, 

The superior smile spread, and a nincompooj) who 
had sense enough to write in English was selected 
instead. 

Now it was a bad blunder for this man to say he 
was about se nubere ; it was a worse one to use a 
Latin expression, even bashfully, where Anglo- 
Saxon would have expressed the meaning better. 
But was this little slip sufficient reason for rejecting 



THE TEACHER AS HE SHOULD BE 25 

a man whose general scholarship and teaching skill 
and executive ability were attested by ten years of 
marked success in like work ? I am glad to say in 
this case the rejected candidate was employed by a 
less finical board of trustees in a neighboring 
academy, hitherto a feeble rival, but since then of 
such rapid growth that it has long overshadowed 
the other. 

These men would not have rejected a 2:20 horse 
because one of his ears had been clipped a trifle, or 
a Holstein cow of big milking-record because her 
white belt was a little wider on the near side. But 
this pedantic chairman chuckled so conceitedly over 
this one little blunder lie had chanced to detect, 
that he forgot all the evidence of exceptional ability, 
and in rejecting this man permitted his academy so 
effectually to veil itself that it has been wedded to 
obscurity ever since. 

When Robert Bonner wanted a mate for Dexter, 
he offered a hundred thousand dollars for any 
horse that could equal Dexter's record. He cared 
nothing for details. The horse might have four 
white feet and a white nose (as indeed Dexter 
had), a docked tail, knock-knees, the blind-stag- 
gers if you will — still the money was ready. All 



26 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

he asked for was a horse that could trot in 2:18. 

School committees might well partake something 
of this spirit. See everything if you will : length 
of the hair, color of the neck-tie, quality of the 
cuffs, — I agree with you, it all counts. I respect 
the judgment of the Irishman who declined to vote 
for a candidate with a No. 6 hat and No. 12 shoes, 
if that was all the Irishman knew about him. But 
remember that sometimes a man's a man for a' that ; 
and that when he has a record behind him there 
are other things to consider than whether he patron- 
izes your tailor and attends your church, 

my friends, why not say, " Give me the most 
of a Man you can for the money." If he can turn 
your boys and girls into honest, earnest, scholarly, 
self-respecting, high-minded men and women, be 
he tall or short, young or old, graduate or no grad- 
uate. Baptist or Unitarian, Tammany Democrat or 
Prohibitionist, he is the man you want. 

Here is the difficulty in apjjlying to the selection 
of teachers the rules of the Civil Service. Those 
who heard the persuasive voice of George William 
Curtis at Philadelphia, last winter, might well have 
been allured for the moment into believing that it 
was the great need of our scliools to be brought 



THE TEACHKR AS HE SHOtILD BE 2) 

under the operation of the Civil Service. But 
reflection shows that character, personality, indi- 
vidual influence can never he determined l>y ques- 
tion papers. It is legitmate to establish a minimum 
standard of qualification, as by our uniform exam- 
inations ; but when you go further and say this 
man must be taken because he passed 98 per cent, 
and that man must be rejected because he passed 
97|- i:)er cent, you go too ftir. As Superintendent 
Draper puts it, " Tlie State has every right to say 
who shall not teach, l)ut she has no right to say 
who shall teach." 

Hence it is not altogether to be regretted that an 
application of Chancellor Curtis's principle should 
have occurred so soon and in his own university. 
The New York commission held that the two in- 
spectors of academies, — officers in whom the require- 
ment of scholarship was as nothing compared with 
those of experience, judgment, the respect and con- 
fidence of the academy principals, — should be ap- 
pointed by competitive examination. You might 
as well pick out a wife by competitive examination. 
The action of the commission in this matter has 
put back civil service reform ten years, if indeed 
among thinking men it has not dealt it an irrepar- 
able blow. 



28 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

" I say, Mac," asked a customer of an Ann street 
bookseller, " what is this edition de luxy I see pub- 
lishers advertising of so many books?" 

"An edition de luxef" replied the bookseller 
cheerfully ; " why you've seen a rabbit? " 

"Yes." 

" And you've seen a jackass ? " 

" Yes." 

" Well, a jackass is an edition de luxe of a rabbit." 

If the New York (*ivil Service Commission were 
to be judged by its action upon academy inspectors, 
it might well l)e (-illod an edition de luxe — in con- 
tinuous proportion. 

All these small measures that you apply to ordin- 
ary men fail when you come to such a teacher as I 
am considering. 

Take tact for instance. The youngest committee- 
man knows that tact is indispensable, and he does 
not draw a very definite distinction between tact 
and policy. The teacher must know how to get 
along smoothly. Boards of education like a teacher 
of whom they hear nothing. A princi|)al like a 
stomach is perfect only when you are unconscious 
of him. He reports at the annual meeting that 
the teachers are excellent, the text-books are giving 



THE TEACHER AS HE SHOULD BE 29 

entire satisfaction, there is no need of any appara- 
tus, and the commissioner told him tliis was the 
best school in the country. So he is re-elected year 
after year : and if you ask any one in the village 
whether there is a school there, the reply will be, 
" Why, I suppose so ; the bell rings every morn- 
ing." To some people it is with the school as with 
the Indian — the only good school is a dead school. 

You know this type of teacher : there is a great 
many of him. He is the man who is continually 
making his calling sure by making sure of his 
election — his next one. He is satisfied to have, 
like a geometrical point, position without magni- 
tude. 

Now what is tact, but yielding to the whims of 
others ? The average teacher must have it, because 
without it he cannot get along at all. But the mas- 
terful teacher does not steer himself sinuously about 
the edges of other people's whims so as not to graze 
them : he teaches other people to keep their whims 
out of his way. The man of tact adapts himself 
to circumstances ; the masterful man controls them. 
It is better to yield than to quarrel, but it is better 
yet to control. 

It is a great blessing to come under the influence 



30 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

of a masterful man. This age loses something of 
the mental fibre that characterizes pioneers, because 
it is less accustomed to grapple with difficulties. It 
has been calculated to the fraction of a per cent, what 
the average boy can do. His life gets set in a 
groove, and he anticipates only disaster if he should 
jump the rails and strike out into the fields. 

But the masterful teacher shows him that the 
possibilities have not yet been surmised, and leads 
him to substitute for the confident " It can't be 
done," the hopeful "Let's give it a try." This is 
no age to sit by the side of the brook and wait for 
the water to run by. " Young man," Martin An- 
derson used to say, ^^ make things come to pass." 
The power of the human will has too little recogni- 
tion in education. It does remove mountains ; 
mountains vanish before it. 

Can you not sacrifice something in non-essentials 
to secure a man like this? The ideal is of course 
the iron hand in the velvet glove ; but suppose you 
can't have both, which will you dispense with, the 
hand or the glove ? The glove is smoother ; but in 
this modern current of indolence, indifference, and 
conscious helplessness it takes a strong grip on the 
oar to turn your school up-stream and give your 
scholars a purpose to live for. 



THE teachp:r as he should be 31 

The teacher's morality, for instance, must be of 
the stalwart type. It is not enough that he be 
inoffensive ; he must be aggressively honest and 
pure. No didactic lessons have such effect upon 
watchful pupils as the instinctive gesture of con- 
tempt in a pure-minded teacher when there is any 
manifestation of baseness ; nor can they atone for 
the weakening of the pupil's moral fibre when the 
teacher makes light of dishonesty in examination, 
or shows enjoyment of a libidinous jest. Says the 
latest biographer of Thomas Arnold : 

" The great peculiarity and charm of his nature 
seemed to lie in the regal supremacy of the moral 
and the spiritual element over his whole being and 
powers. His intellectual faculties were not such as 
to surpass those of many who were his contempo- 
raries ; in scholarship he occupied a subordinate 
place to several who filled situations like his ; and 
he had not much of what is usually called tact in 
his dealings with either the juvenile or the adult 
mind. What gave him his power, and secured for 
him so deeply the respect and veneration of his 
pupils and acquaintances, was the intensely religious 
character of his whole life." 

It is this positive element that is indispensable in 



32 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

the ideal teacher. We want more of the Robert 
Browning estimate of men, not by what they refrain 
from, but by what they do. It is the Bible judg- 
ment. The man with the one talent whimpered 
that he didn't drink, he didn't smoke, he didn't 
swear, he didn't play billards, he never sat down to 
the table with his coat off or ate with his knife ; 
but the great judge interrupted him: " What are 
the things you have done to make this world bet- 
ter?" And the man who hadn't done anything 
was done for. 



I have said that Dr. Andrews's picture was of the 
teacher "before taking" ; I might add that mine is 
of the teacher before being taken, and not jalto- 
gether likely to be taken. 

A while ago a man was praising his preceptress 
to me interminably, and to get to a period I sum- 
med it U}:) for him. " In short," I said, " she is a 
royal woman." 

" Royal ! " he exclaimed, starting on a fresh tack, 
" royal ! She is more than royal : she is empirical ! " 

He hadn't had the Regents' syllabus in etymol- 
ogy, but there are boards of education that, honest 



THE TEACHER AS HE SHOULD BE 33 

Indian, would rather have for principal a quack 
than a king. 

For what is a quack 2 Why, a quack is a man 
who makes up for ignorance of his subject by 
knowledge of his victim. He can't cure a man, 
but he can flatter him. The educational quack 
knows little about pedagogy, but he knows a good 
deal about making every member of the board in 
turn believe that he is the member who is running 
the school. And that member likes it. 

For it is an unhappy fact that independence of 
thought and action is about the last thing a board 
of education looks for in a teacher. You know the 
cities of this State pretty well : tell me how many 
of them would employ a masterful man for super- 
intendent — if they knew it. I doubt if the Repub- 
lican caucus would have united on Judge Draper 
five years ago, if they had foreseen where he was 
going to land them. Educational officials want a 
man to carry out their ideas, not to originate ideas 
of his own. 

Suppose we tried that in other professions. I go 
to a physician and say : "I want you to doctor my 
family, but you must come to me first to find out 
what is the ing,tter with them and how to cure it. 



34 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

You can mix and administer the doses, but 1 will 
prescribe them." He would be very likely to leave 
me to the tender mercies of Tutt's Pills. 

Or suppose, again, I go to a lawyer and say : "I 
have a complicated case here that I want taken 
care of, but you must do it in my way. 1 will 
explain what the law is and how to api)ly it, but 
you can make out the papers and address the jury." 
He would be apt to remind me that the man who 
was his own lawyer had a fool for a client. 

Or again, suppose I say to a clergyman : " We 
have decided to hire you as pastor, but you will 
understand that you must follow our dictation. We 
have here an elaborate printed course, giving you 
the subject of each sermon and pra3'^er throughout 
the year, and the length of them, and should like 
to have the manuscripts submitted to us for revision 
on the Saturday before." He won't tell us he 
would see us in Gehenna first, but he will think our 
chances are good to get there. 

Edw^ard Thring wrote to a friend who asked 
advice : 

" My view is simple. The skilled workman 
ought to be allowed uncontrolled management of 
the work. Governors ought to sanction his plan uf 



THPJ TEACHER AS HE SHOULD BE 85 

work origiDally, and see that the work up to a fair 
average is honestly done. But no work can flour- 
ish over a series of years which is exposed to inter- 
ference from local amateurs in authority." 

When the teacher is as he should be, that view 
of his office will be recognized and maintained. 



TEACHING AS A BUSINESS FOR MEN 



To the subject as assigned to me, I have takeu 
the liberty to add the words " for Men " : partly 
because as thus hmited the subject is quite broad 
enough for a half-hour's discussion ; and partly 
because, to make my point of view distinct, I desire 
to approach the question in the attitude of the 
young man just graduated, who has a natural 
inclination toward the work of a teacher, and is 
looking the field over to decide whether it will pay. 

Let us suppose a case. Here is John Doe, freshly 
B. A., a young man of good health, high character, 
accurate scholarship, social culture, and tact, — 
shrewd, determined, persistent, enthusiastic, — in 
short, a man bound to stand in the higher ranks of 
any employment he may select. He comes to me for 
advice as to choosing a profession. He has been 
fortunate enough to recognize his indebtedness to 
one or two superior teachers, and he thinks he 
would like to send out a few young men every year 

(37) 



38 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

who would feel that way toward him. 80 without 
looking upon it as a, matter of duty he is inclined 
to become a teacher ; anci he asks my advice as to 
whether it is from the woi'ldly-wise point of view a 
desirable choice. The real question in my mind 
and in his is this : Ought teaching under j^resent 
conditions to command the services of first-class 
young men ? 

" Well, John," I say, " tell me some of the advan- 
tages you think it holds out." 

" Why, in the first place," he replies, " I suppose 
one is tolerably sure of a living." 

" Ahem ! possibly," I say. " That depends upon 
what one means by a living. If you mean exist- 
ence, Yes. If you mean the leisure and the money 
to develop your possibilities on all sides ; to sur- 
round yourself with the comforts and conveniences 
of modern civilization ; to command the resources 
of literature, and the companionship of great men ; 
to see and hear at will all that is noblest in nature 
and in art, that your standards may be the highest 
— decidedly No." 

" But teachers get good salaries," he urges. 

" Poor teachers do. Third-and fourth-rate men 
are overpaid in this business as nowhere else. But 



TEACHING AS A BUSINESB FOR MEN 39 

first-rate men have no opportunities. Dr. Wicker- 
sham, of Pensylvauia, has been looking up this 
matter, and he says there are only ten teachers and 
superintendents in that State who get $2,000 a year ; 
that in Lancaster the superintendent of schools gets 
$1,'")00, and the overseer of the cotton-mill, $8,000 ; 
that lie has known a lawyer to exact a fee greater 
than any teacher's earnings for five years, while a 
doctor may obtain in an hour a sum that most 
teachers cannot gather in a life-time." 

The young man sighs. " I suppose that I shall 
have to be economical," he says, "but at least the 
teacher is a man of influence and social position." 

" Indeed ? " I reply. " That is not the usual 
opinion entertained even by teachers themselves. 
Here is part of an editorial from the Neiv England 
Journal of Education* : 

" A teacher is respectable; but when you have 
said that you have stated all that the mass of people 
will allow concerning him. He is respectable in 
the same way that a good book is respectable ; valu- 
able for what it contains, but still an inanimate 
object, something that cannot enter into the active 
struggles of life, something to be taken down at 

*xi.395. 



40 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

})leasurc, and at pleasure shelved ; valuable chiefly 
ill the focttliat, though learned and wise, and, per- 
haps, witty, it must yet, on all occasions, keep per- 
fectly still. * * * The world looks upon the 
school as the grown man would regard his swaddling 
clothes, and upon the teaching profession as a sort 
of colored mammy, a thing deserving affectionate 
treatment, and yet a silly old institution after all. 
' How's school ? ' is the constant greeting to the 
teacher, and he is vain enough to imagine that there 
is some interest or sympatliy in the question, and 
usually garrulous enough to run on with tlie tale of 
his petty troubles and triumphs, imagining that the 
smile of amusement or contempt worn by his 
auditors is one of sympatliy and appreciation." 

John looks gloomy. " At any rate," he says, "I 
shall be regarded as a professional man." 

" You may be by district-school teachers who sign 
their letters ' Prof Richard Roe '. But the leaders 
of the profession do not think so. The first point 
made by C. O. Thompson before the American 
Institute of Instruction in 1867, was this : 'There 
is no recognized profession of teaching ; ' G. Stanley 
Hall, in 1882, began his paper before the Depart- 
ment of Superintend<^nce on chairs of pedagogy by 



TEACHING AS A BUSINESS FOR MEN 41 

a reference to the brief chapter on snakes in Ire- 
land ; and in 1872 James H. Hoose, in a paper 
before the New York State Teachers' Association on 
the term Profession as apphed to teaching, said that 
the science of teaching had no maxims, no customs 
and estabhshed usages, no positive subject-matter 
codified, no common theory of nature, no examin- 
ations or removals by the fraternity solely, no estab- 
lished rules of practice, no systematic code of prin- 
ciples, no bodies to supervise rules — in short, none 
of the bases upon which a profession is founded. 

" Make a single application. Nothing is more 
distinctive of a profession than that its right is 
recognized to determine its own membership. Yet, 
who ever heard of a board of examiners composed 
of teachers? A bright woman wrote to the Ohio 
Educational Monthly * .■ 

" ' I was examined in the great and glorious Com- 
monwealth of Ohio for the first time about three 
years ago. The Board of Examiners consisted of a 
preacher, a doctor, and a lawyer. The following are 
some of the marks : 

Grade, 1st class. Orthography, 10. 

Reading, 7. Arithmetic, 9J, 

Theory and practice of teaching, 10. 



42 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

" ' I could not understand, neither can I yet fully 
comprehend, how I could teach ten when I could 
only read seven. It is hardly just to certify that a 
teacher is first-class when she can only cipher nine 
and a half. The Association said we must exalt 
our profession, and if we are first-class, let us be 
first-class all the way through. I do not consider 
teaching a profession. I regard it as a business, — 
not a very profitable one, but a very honorable one. 
It may be, if we should make the attem2:)t, that we 
could exalt the business into a profession. If not, 
we might bring the professions down to our level. 
The doctor's certificate might be made to read : 
Measles, 10. Theory and practice 

Cholera, 3. of medicine, 9J. 

Typhoid fever, 6J, 
" ' We all know that there are good and bad law- 
yers, and we might grade them something like this : 
Criminal Code, 7|. Theory and practice 
Real Estate, 3{^. of law, 9^^. 

Divorce, 10. 
" * It would never do to assert that there are good 
preachers and bad preachers, but we may say there 
are a few poor preachers, and if any one is offended 
we can explain that poor means lean. Their license 
might be filled out : 



TEACHING AS A BUSINESS f'OR MEN 43 

Repentence, 6|. Election, 8. 

Conversion, 7^j. Theory and practice 

Eternal punishment, 10. of religion, 5|-. 

" ' I forgot one im})ortant matter. These papers 
ought to be good for one year or two, according to 
the grades, and only in the county where issued.' " 

And not even yet is John discouraged. " I may 
not get money or fame," he says bravely, compress- 
ing his lips ; " I may not even command the respect 
due to a professional man. But at least I can give 
my life to making better men and women. I will 
study ''the problem of education, evolve my princi- 
ples, apply them with fresh differentiation to every 
pupil, watch the development of the child that 
enters a })rimary room into the young man that 
goes out into the world better and truer and wiser 
and more useful because part of my heart and life 
have entered into him." 

" You mean you would if you were permitted to, 
John. But you must remember that the principal 
of a school is hired by, and directed by, a board of 
education. In the first place, you have got to 
secure a position ; and in interviewing a board of 
education with reference to your first engagement, 
you are not unlikely to encounter some unexpected 



44 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

phenomena. When you are in 3'on have got to 
keep in. Your engagement may be only during 
the pleasure of the hoard, and at the best is hut for 
a year. A single member of the board whose inter- 
ference you have resented or wdiose child you have 
slighted may defeat your re-election ; and y(^ur sys- 
tem, which a first year can hardly have developed, 
not to say put into operation, must l>e thrown aside 
when you encounter the new problems of anotl^er 
school. 

" Even if by an intelligent or indifferent board you 
are allowed to remain, j^ou are hampered by restric- 
tions that would be scouted by strictly pi'ofessional 
men. AVho directs a minister how he shall i)reach 
his sermon, a lawyer how he shall conduct his case, 
a physician how he shall com])Oun(l his }>i-es('rip- 
tion ? But a teacher works under a course of study 
and a scheme of regulations adopted by a board of 
education. He is to be at school twenty minutes 
before the hour, to stand in the entry durhig recess, 
to report all cases of discipline for api)roval, and to 
use text-books adoi)ted without reference to his 
opinion by men ignorant of the very subject-matter. 
Gail Hamilton says that a member of the board of 
education in Washington objected to consrlting 



TEACHING AS A BUSINESS FOR MEN 45 

teachers regarding text-books on the ground that it 
was not dignified for employers to consult those they 
employed. How would you like to develop charac- 
ter undi'r such supervision as tliat? " 

"But surely you will admit," urges John, "that 
many noble men arc teachers. How did they come 
to choose this business, if it was so unattractive?" 

"They didn't choose it," I reph' ; "they chose 
something else to which teaching was to be a step- 
ping-stone. 

"'Where is there a man among us,' says the 
Sclioolmaster'^'' , 'from superintendent down, who be- 
gan to teach with the distinct purpose of making 
that a life-work? Find liim and lie will be one in 
a thousand. We have drifted into the business, and 
we have not drifted and cannot drift out of it.' " 

" Truly, Socrates," says John, it seemeth that I 
should consider further before I adopt a j^rofession." 

" O xVlcibiades," I reply, "your head is level." 



Fellow members of this Association, the truth is 
not to be spoken at all times, and at these meetings 
you do not always speak it, the whole of it. But 
the subject assigned me by our president calls for a 

* 11.114. 



46 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

practical, hard-headed statement of facts. Have I 
not presented the case fairly? Would you, with 
the exceptionally fortunate experience that has 
attended most of you, would you advise a young 
man of superior ability to become a teacher? Do 
you want your son to settle down to teaching as the 
work of his life? 

I yield to no one in my appreciation of the joys 
of teaching. The ha])piest work I ever did was in 
the school-room. As T write, my eyes suffuse when 
I recall the class that graduated thirteen years ago 
at a village school a few miles nortli of here, and 
remember the loyalty, the trustworthiness, the con- 
fidence of those boys and girls Avho were rather 
companions than })U})ils. But my salary was prov- 
ing insufficient, and an op})ortnnity to engage in 
other business came to me just as I was chafing 
under restrictions upon my work, slight in them- 
selves, but significant as showing by how indifferent 
a touch the board of education may topple down 
the foundations the teacher is building upon. And 
so, after six years' experience, I gave up teaching ; 
and I liave never regretted it. Indeed, I have 
wondered sometimes how a man with ability to 
succeed at anything else should continue to be a 



TEACHING AS A BUSINESS FOR MEN 47 

teacher. Uuder its present conditions, the business 
of teaching deserves to command only third-class 
talent ; and the fact that some of the men whom 
this Association assembles are by their own assent 
teachers might be looked upon as an interposition 
of Providence in behalf of our children. 

These things ought not so to be ; they are not 
always so to be : how long dejiends much upon how 
clearly we recognize the causes, and with what unity 
we strive to overcome them. 

The usual appeal of the daily newspaper or the 
public orator is for Higher Salaries, as though a 
legislative enactment raising the compensation of 
teachers 50 j^er cent, would raise the quality of their 
work in the same proportion. 

To experienced teachers, especially to those ac- 
customed to read and to write upon this question, 
the fallacy of such an assumption need not be 
pointed out. There are at the present time hun- 
dreds of good teachers ready to be engaged and to 
do the best work of which they are capable at 
the salaries now jiaid ; and they cannot get places 
because of methods of appointment, especially in 
cities, that give such j^laces to persons whose chief 
recommendation is that they are unqualified to do 
anything else. 



48 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

"Pat," said one Irishman to another, as they 
paused from ditch-digging to mop their brows, 
" Pat, what business would you Hke best if you had 
the choosing of it ? " 

" Why, for a nice, dacent, clane bit of worruk, I 
think I'd hke to be a Bishop." 

And so because teaching is to the incompetent a 
nice, dacent, chine bit of worruk, they are lifted 
into it by those who otherwise would have to sup- 
port them. Raise salaries one-half without raising 
the standard of qualification, and not only do you 
fix more firmly than ever in place these relatives of 
the board and friends of local demagogues, but you 
turn the hungry eyes of politicians toward i)laces 
not now considered fat enough to be worthy spoil, 
and displace some of the best of the teachers you 
already have. 

" The wages paid by the community for teaching 
in our public schools," says the Hon. S. M. Clarke*, 
" are ample — are prodigal in some cases — to youth 
and inexperience. They are scant and inadequate 
to age and experience. But — save exceptionally — 
supply governs price. Since the public — the demand 
— is satisfied with youth as a teacher, and the sup- 

* The Schoolmaster, Chicago, iii.125. 



TEACHING AS A BUSINESS FOR MEN 49 

ply of youth for teaching is so abiindaut that every 
school board in the land is worried with an excess 
of applicants, that will inevitably fix teaching wage, 
and the level of it will be youth's wage. Men and 
women who give their lives to teaching must con- 
front that grim and disheartening fact." 

A^ project supplementary to arbitrary increase of 
salaries, is that of Pensions to retired teachers. Here 
there is among teachers some discussion f, though I 
should judge the weight of opinion was manifestly 
against them. 

The objection just urged applies with even stronger 
force against this innovation, since the incompetent 
who have flocked after the places where they could 
get i^ay for very little work, will clutch after them 
the more greedily when there is attached to them 
the possibility of pay for no work at all. 

But there is another consideration. Already the 
most discouraging feature of the profession is that 
the teacher is looked upon as an impractical man, 
useful enough to take care of boys and girls under 
rules established by lawyers, doctors, and business- 
men, but unfitted for participation in any of the 
serious work of the community. I remember read- 

i Indiana School Journal, xxvi.339. 



50 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

ing of a schoolhouse dedication, where at the very 
close of the exercises, after the audience was wearied 
by speeches from butcher and baker and candlestick- 
maker, the chairman remarked benignly : " We 
desire that at this festival of rejoicing all classes of 
the community should be represented upon the 
platform, and therefore we will call upon the princi- 
pal of the school for a few brief remarks." Indeed, 
a western normal school recently projjosed to ap- 
point as principal some thorough-going and success- 
ful business man, one of brains, but wholly free 
from pedagogical superstitions, who should intro- 
duce life and spirit and business methods into the 
school. 

" Savans and donkeys to the rear," was Napoleon's 
order in Egypt. 

For this conception of our calling we are much 
at fault. Listen, for instance, to this proposition by 
Adolph Douai * : 

" The teacher ought to be a pensioner of the State : 
every care for his existence should be taken from off 
his mind. He should be spared every indignity of a 
dependent condition, every struggle for existence, in 
order to belong to his calling exclusively, and to 
embrace it with devotion." 

* In JVew England Journal of Education, xii.228. 



TEACHING AS A BUSINESS FOR MEN 51 

This is making teachers not merely babes but 
intellectual eunuchs. It is manhood in the teacher 
that commands respect, and that makes men of his 
scholars ; and what sort of manhood is that which 
cannot contract its own bills and pay them and lay 
by something for a rainy day? The word "pen- 
sion" suggests a physical cripple; but he is an 
intellectual hunchback who embraces a profession 
in youth with the hope that in old age he may be 
permitted to sun himself on the veranda of a State 
poorhouse. 

I know that pensions are paid to retired judges, 
as well as to crippled soldiers ; and when the occu- 
pation of teaching ranks with that of judges, and 
our salaries correspond with theirs, we may be able 
to receive without self-reproach what will then be a 
pension liberal in amount. The man who would 
not care to hold out his hat on a street-corner may 
accept with beaming satisfaction a '' testimonial " 
from his fellow-citizens. But with salaries as they 
are and teachers as they are, the man who drew his 
pension .would look like a beggar : and feel like one. 

Without discussing the question of Tomre of 
Office, I would merely suggest that in this effort we 
are asking what the well-paid officers of corpora- 



52 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

tions do not find necessary. The bank-teller and 
cashier hold office only for a year ; and they are 
usuall}^ re-elected, — if they are still this side of the 
St. Lawrence. The insurance-president, the cotton- 
mill superintendent are subject to annual election ; 
but it seldom worries them. The fact is, in all 
such positions the man knows that he is practically 
indispensable, and his confidence rests on that 
assurance. 

Now why should not the teacher make himself 
indispensable in the same way? The answer is 
easy : the board of education does not know how 
to measure his work, as a board of directors knows 
how to measure the work of a bank-cashier or a 
cotton-mill superintendent. 

For instance, perhaps no theory of education is 
more thorouglily established than Jacotot's of mas- 
terly inactivity. The teacher is most useful when 
he is seemingly most useless. The little boy who 
couldn't do his i)roblems, and didn't see why he 
needed to learn because when he was a man he 
would be a teacher and make his scholars do 'em, 
hit upon a great educational principle. 

But what would the average member of a board 
of education think of it ? You know the story of 



TEACHING AS A BUSINESS FOR MEN 53 

the petroliarch who hired a string-quartette for liis 
daughter's reception. Passing by, he observed that 
one of the vioHnists was not playing. 

"See here, mister," lie said, "what's the matter 
with you ? Why aren't you at it? " 

" Why, sir, I have a sixteen bars' rest here." 

"Rest? at three dollars a night? Not if I know 
it : you start that fiddle ! " 

So the average member of a board of education 
sits beside the teacher and sees a class come in list- 
less and indifferent, sees them march back to their 
seats half an hour afterward brimming with life 
and enthusiasm, reflects that they are bright child- 
ren if his boy happens to be among them, but 
declares the teacher has the easiest work he ever 
saw — nothing to do but sit still and listen. He 
never dreams — how should he ? — that the life and 
enthusiasm these thirty scholars carry away have 
been drained out of the teacher as positively as his 
blood would be drained by a vein-opening. In 
reverent imitation of tlie great JNIaster, the true 
teacher may say at the close of school, "Virtue has 
gone out of me." But it has gone out unobtrusively, 
perhaps unconsciously ; and this quiet, observant, 
sympathetic teacher, who has poured out his heart's 



54 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

life for his scholars, may be displaced by a brawl- 
ing braggart who will make more impression be- 
cause he makes more noise. 

And this leads to what seems to me more import- 
ant than raising of salaries, or establishment of 
pensions, or lengthened terms of service — and that 
is Discrimination in Employment. 

"These, then," says President Eliot*, "are the 
three main features of a well-organized public 
school service : careful selection of teachers by ex- 
amination and probation ; ultimate appointment, 
without limitation of time ; and a system of retir- 
ing annuities." 

All I ask is that reforms be attempted in this 
order. 

I can only hint at some of the immediate steps 
we might be taking. 

(1) Teachers should discriminate among them- 
selves and against themselves. I do not at this 
moment remember conversing with a teacher about 
a contemporary teacher superior to himself. It 
amuses one whose attention has been called to 
it to notice how inevitably inquiry about a fellow- 
teacher leads the speaker to comparisons favorable 

* yeiv England Journal of Education, xi.:30. 



TEACHING AS A BUSINESS FOR MEN 00 

to himself. The nightingale has a tolerably smooth 
voice, but somehow it lacks breadth. 

Now there are lawyers who will admit that they 
have superiors at the bar. If Mr. Evarts were 
stricken with paralysis, not all the young attorneys 
in the country would jump upon the train and rush 
to New York to apply for his position. A good 
many of them would be aware that they could 
not fill the place. 

(2) Teachers should be men among men, with 
nothing in their dress or their manner or their con- 
versation to indicate that their functions are limited 
to the school-room. 

I was urging one of the normal principals in this 
State to forward a certain matter before the Legis- 
lature, on the ground that he was so free from the 
external characteristics of the pedagogue that he 
could meet the members on a level, and not be con- 
sidered an impractical visionary. 

" Yes," he said, " I had evidence the other morn- 
ing that I am not recognized at forty rods as a 
teacher. I had been riding three or four hours on 
the cars, and the limited accommodations at the 
Brackett House did not enable me to remove all the 
cinders. I sat down to be shaved, and the barber 



56 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

began his orchestral accompaniment by inquiring 
where I had played the night before. 

" ' Played ? ' I repeated. 

" ' Why, yes,' he said ; ' don't yon belong to Cal 
Wagner's minstrel troupe?' " 

There are men in the profession, who if they saw 
themselves as the public looks upon them would 
take it as a compliment to be mistaken for a nigger- 
minstrel. 

(.')) The difference in the results of good teaching 
and poor teaching should be proved and empha- 
sized and illustrated. It is a common assumption 
that the cost of educating a child is the cost of his 
tuition ; hence that if one teacher at 1 1,000 a year 
accomplishes half as much with fifty boys as an- 
other at $2,000, he is as cheap, and it becomes a 
mere question of the quantity one cares to purchase. 
But as a matter of fact the tuition is as subordinate 
an element in the ])ublic school as it is in the pri- 
vate school. The board and clothes and general 
care of the boy should be reckoned as ]-)iiri of the 
cost of his education ; and when these are estimated 
it becomes a question of $16,000 as the cost of edu- 
cating under one teacher, against $17,000 under the 
other, with twice the results. 



TKACHING AS A BUSINESS FOR MEN 57 

" We tliiuk there is no exaggeration in saying," 
re})orted the Committee on Normal Schools to the 
New York Legislature*, "that a teacher who under- 
stands his business will accomplish more in a year 
than is accomplished in three years under untrained 
instruction. " Suppose she is an intermediate teacher 
at $300 a year, with fifty children under her ; and 
that a competent teacher could be secured for $500. 
Then estimating the home expenses of each child at 
$300 a year, the cost of securing the same amount 
of education is in the case of the incompetent 
teacher $45,900 as against $15,500 in the case of a 
sui3erior teacher. 

Nor is this the measure of the extravagance of 
hiring poor teachers. The old Greek musician 
charged double price to those who had taken les- 
sons before coming to him — one half for correcting 
bad habits. It is questionable whether the bad 
habits formed under an incompetent teacher can be 
eradicated at any cost of time and money. Your 
scholars might better have been pupils of Mr. 
Wopsle's great aunt, " who kept a school in the vil- 
lage ; that is to say," as Dickens puts it, " she was 
a ridiculous old woman of limited means and un- 

* Report 1879, p. 41. 



58 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

limited infirmity, who used to go to sleep from six 
to seven every evening in the society of youth who 
paid two jience per week each for the improving 
opportunity of seeing her do it." 

Nor is it a question of mental loss alone. 

Describing the effect of an incompetent teacher, 
the National Teachers' Monthly* said some years 
ago: 

" Ere long the unconscious parent is pained and 
startled by the intelligence that the child is no 
longer doing well. He is warned that he has been 
absent. The influence of evil associates, unper- 
ceived by the careless or stupid teacher, or neglected, 
has overpowered her influence, notwithstanding the 
immense advantage on her side, and truancy and 
other moral delinquencies ensue. The bright, gen- 
tle, confiding face which was entrusted you by the 
hopeful parent loses its innocent, cleanly look, and 
dirt and wile and sullenness overspread it. Correct 
deportment is despised, and good scholarship loses 
its attractions. He has entered an atmosphere 
where disobedience, insubordination, and rebellion 
are rampant, and the time and strength that should 
be devoted to unfolding tlie mysteries of knowledge 



TEACHING AS A BUSINESS FOR MEN 59 

are enlisted in a harsh and hopeless struggle to 
maintain an odious and barren discipline." 

"A weed," says Emerson, " is a plant whose vir- 
tues have not yet been discovered." There are 
weeds in every school-room that the indifferent 
teacher neglects or casts into the highway, to become 
desperados and criminals. There are teachers who 
would recoonize strength under the rudeness of such 
natures, and transform them by sympathy and cul- 
ture into pillars of the school and of tlie State. 
Do you think the })ublic could afford to make a 
hundred dollars difference in the salaries of two 
such teachers ? 

(4) There should be less development of elaborate 
systems, and more recognition of the personality of 
the teacher. 

" Education is a dynamical, not a mechanical 
process," says Dr. Arnold, " and the more powerful 
and vigorous the mind of the teacher, the more 
clearly and readily he can grasp things, the better 
fitted he is to cultivate the mind of another." 

" Few people realize the fact," says President 
Eliot, " that there can be no good teaching without 
a quick sympathy and perception in the teacher, 
and a strong personal influence going out from 
him." 



60 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

Canning summarizes, wlien he says it is not the 
harness but the liorses that draw the chariot. 

"I do not care what you study," says Emerson, 
"I only care to know wlio is to be your teacher." 

Says the Century, " Tlie minister of pubhc instruc- 
tion who boasted that lie could look at his watch 
and know just what question was being asked in 
every school of a given grade in France, was a good 
illustration of a system-worshiper." 

Another writer lias said : " A school committee 
hires a superintendent, and then thinks it can safely 
employ an inferior class of teachers, just as an in- 
ferior class of laborers ma}" safely be employed for 
digging or sweeping if a smart overseer is hired to 
watch tliem. . . Now a gain in superintendence 
which is })rocured at the expense of a loss of direct 
teaching power is too dearly bought. The reason 
of this is contained in a self-evident' pro2)Osition 
which all people admit on its bare statement, and 
yet too often lose sight of A good school is not a 
grand building, or a nice set of furniture, or a series 
of text-books selected l)y a committee, or a pro- 
gramme of studies made up by the superintendent; 
and all these things put together, though each were 
the best of the kind, would not make a good school ; 
for a uood school is a man or a woman." 



TEACHING AS A BUSINESS FOR MEN 61 

The system, however complete, can give only the 
general principles. The indispensable individual 
application to each pupil can be made only by the 
discriminating and sympathetic teacher. 

The line between amateur and professional work 
may be drawn through just the point where the 
teacher recognizes that his study is not of the sub- 
ject-matter but of- the class. 

John B. Gough was once asked if ho did not find 
it wearisome to repeat the same anecdotes night 
after night. He replied tliat for the first two or 
three times he delivered it, lie enjoyed his lecture. 
Then it became for a dozen nights common-i)lace 
and tedious, and lie dreaded to begin it. But by 
this time it was familiar to him and he began to 
turn his attention from the lecture itself to the 
audience as affected b}- it. This always proved an 
unflagging source of interest. As he approached a 
humoi'ous or a pathetic climax he began to wonder 
whether it would be a|)preciated, and he learned to 
experiment upon expi-ession and emphasis to see 
just what was surest to capture the i)articular audi- 
ence before liim. Wlieii this stage was reached he 
was sure of quite as much entertainment from the 
audience as they could get from him. 



62 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

This is the attitude of the professional teacher. 
He does not complain languidly that he is tired of 
teaching arithmetic because he knows all about it. 
He may know all about addition of fractions, and 
what are on general principles the best methods 
of teaching it, but he does not know till he exper- 
iments just how addition of fractions will strike 
the mind of Tommy Jones. The recitation teaches 
him nothing new about fractions, but it teaches him 
a good deal about Tommy Jones. 

Now that is a sort of study the system cannot 
provide for. " The teacher may adapt methods but 
should never adopt them." " The man who would 
translate a book out of one language into another 
must know both," and the teacher who would put 
ideas into a child's mind must know the mind as 
well as the ideas. "It is not by his own taste but 
by that of the fish, that a sportsman baits his hook," 
says Macaulay, and the teacher will present his 
subject not as would be clearest to himself, but as 
experience and observation shows him will be clear- 
est to this particular pupil. 

" To be able to find out the peculiar constitution 
of each child's mind," says Jean Paul Richter, "so 
as to bring what you would teach down to the level 



TEACHING AS A BUSINESS FOR MEN 63 

of its understanding, and yet to make it work in 
such a way as to seize upon and comprehend the 
subject and reproduce it, this is teaching : and noth- 
ing else deserves the name." 

Such considerations I would urge upon the pub- 
lic, in conversation, at associations, — and in those 
educational columns of local newspapers that prin- 
cipals should seek to secure and control. Especially 
would I avoid assuming at these associations any 
attitude that makes examinations less severe, posi- 
tion less dependent on results, simple incumbency 
more secure. By etymology, the sinecurist is long- 
lived, and if we wait for the lymphatic ins to die 
off, young and vigorous outs will stagnate for want 
of opportunity. 

I do not quarrel with Life-Tenure, or even with 
Pensions, provided we can first be assured of what 
seems to me an indispensable pre-requisite to the 
beneficial working of either. — viz., that the work of 
superior teachers be recognized and secured. I do 
not ask that only competent teachers be hired : — in 
fifty years under the most favorable conditions we 
shall not have enough competent teachers for our 
schools. I do not ask even that the average teacher 
recognize the demands his work makes upon him, 
or try to meet them. 



64 TEACHING AS A BFSINESS 

But 1 do ask that the teacher who is competent, 
who does recognize these demands, and wlio does 
meet them, shall no longer be compelled to contend 
for a position on eqnal terms witli a beardless lad 
from college, or a sole support of a widowed mother, 
or a woodman-spare-that-tree old fossil whom the 
committee are too tender-hearted to turn out. There 
are a few men who love teaching, who were born to 
enlist the sympathy of children, and who devote 
their lives to study of a science of wliich the art is 
so delicate and the results are so momentous. Show 
these men the same recognition that is shown physi- 
cians and lawyers and clergymen, by asking, not 
What sliall be the salary ? but Where can we find 
the man ? 

To put it brietly, the fiital Haw in our status as a 
profession, is tliat the average school-board is a 
checker-board. In playing draughts the only im- 
portant consideration is that the square be covered. 
If a man rolls to the floor out of reach, another will 
do as well, or a penny or a button will serve, — any- 
thing to show that the place is not empty. And so 
if a principal resigns, why, anybody will do that 
can sit in the chair without being -[mi out by the 
big' boys, — your cousin, my nephew, this graduate 



TEACHING AS A BUSINESS FOR MEN 65 

who wants to earn money to pay his college-debts. 

Now suppose we could convert our school-boards 
into chess-boards. When a knight falls to the carpet 
you do not replace him by a pawn, or a rook by a 
bishop ; and you will make almost any sacrifice to 
retain your queen. One of these pawns may some- 
tirue be a queen, but not till by long probation 
and many steps of progress, she has won her posi- 
tion in the queen's row. 

There should be a Queen's Row in teaching, and 
all the steps of progress toward it should be definite 
and certificated. 

Then, and not till then, the Teacher's Business 
will become the Teacher's Profession. 



THE TEACHER'S COMMERCIAL VALUE 



One of those melancholy books written by an 
alleged humorist a few years ago, began like this : 

" Some write books for fame ; some write because 
their friends insist upon it ; some because of a 
heaven-born instinct that must find utterance ; some 
because mankind is thirsty for what they have to 
^ay. But I Avrite for ducats. This book is pub- 
lished to make money out of." 

The joke and the book fell flat ; deservedly. The 
man meant to be funny ; he simply showed himself 
stupid. He was blind to the universal instinct that 
whatever is artistic demands a motive above mere 
gain. The laborer may shovel for his dollar a day : 
but in proportion as intellect, purpose, ideal, enter 
into work, the necessity increases that the basis of 
effort be professional. And the essence of profes- 
sional work is that however liigh or low be the price 
accepted for service, when the service is promised it 
is to be rendered with all zeal. 

(67) 



68 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

Tile brakeinan who was reproved for pronouncing 
Canisteo indistinctly, and inquired indignantly if 
the passengers exj^ected a fine tenor voice for ten 
shillings a day, spoke from the stand})oint of the 
artisan who means that his work shall do justice to 
his employer ; the artist means that his work shall 
be worthy of himself. 

Unhappy the teacher that does not classify him- 
self an artist. Miss I^rackett well says : 

"The teacher who is not willing, so long as she is 
an apprentice, to work with her whole soul for |30(), 
will never reach $1,200. 1 care not if she under- 
stands two languages, or can calculate eclipses, or 
knows all the lists of all the kings and all the 
emperors from Confucuis down. She may even 
have all the knowledge attainable : but without a 
reverence for the art of education, all her acquire- 
ments will be the broken pieces which she ma}^ hold 
in her hand while the ' beistigos band ' is lacking. 
We do sadly need in many cases the reverence of 
the true artist for his work. We do sadly need 
teachers who are artists and not artisans*." 

But there is a certain satisfaction in feeling that 
the quality of one's work is recognized and paid 

* American Journal of Edncafion, Oct., 1877. 



THE teacher's ('OMMERCTAL VALUE 69 

for, and it is from tliis subordinate point of view 
that I ask you to consider some elements of the 
teacher's commercial value. 

Character has commercial value. 

And the first element of character I shall men- 
tion is Integrit}^' It is worth observing that this 
word, which properly means " wholeness ", has been 
limited until it comes to mean trustworthiness in 
business transactions, the common sense of man- 
kind thus formulating the conviction that of all de- 
ficiencies the most fatal is that a man's business 
word is not to be depended on. 

Especially is this true of the teacher. The rela- 
tions under which he meets the parents of his pupils 
are mostly those of business ; the opinions of him 
formed by those parents will depend largely upon 
his promptness in payment. Now perhaps there is 
no other kind of contempt so bitter, so acrimonious, 
as tliat felt by a small tradesman who is embar- 
rassed in his own payments by the delinquency of 
customers who seem to him entirely able to pay. 
To the grocer, the inilknian, the shoemaker, the 
teacher's salary looks enormous ; and if he lets his 
l)ills run, accumulates excuses, and finally seems 
likely to default altogether, these men become violent 



70 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

in their expressions of indignation and contempt. 
I have known one of the best instructors in the 
State, holding a prominent position at a high salary, 
reduced to ask credit for a beefsteak under pretence 
of having left his pocket-book in his other trousers, 
and humiliated by having that credit contemptu- 
ously refused. 

How are pupils to respect a teacher who has in 
the community a reputation like that? Their lips 
soon fall into the habitual curl of scorn that they 
have seen on their parents' lips whenever the teach- 
er's name is mentioned. 

But there is a reflex influence upon the teacher 
himself. The first demand society makes upon a 
man is that he pay his way ; and the three-handed 
men find that the little behind-hand interferes seri- 
ously with the work of the other two. You know 
the story of the minister who used regularly on 
Saturday night to borrow a five-dollar bill of one of 
his deacons, and as regularly to return it on Mon- 
day morning. Having marked the bill lent, to be 
sure the one returned was identical, the deacon 
asked him why he kept borrowing this money he 
never used. 

'' Why, brother Brown," was the repl}', "the fact 



THE teacher's COMMERCIAL VALUE 71 

is I preach better when I am on a sound financial 
basis." 

We all do our work better when we are on 
a sound financial basis. " Income one hundred 
pounds, expenses ninety-nine pounds, nineteen and 
six-pence," says Thackeray in effect, somewhere, 
"result, dignified happiness. Income one hundred 
pounds, expenses one hundred pounds and sixpence, 
result, a sneaking misery." 

One of the normal principals in this State, told 
me once that he had been unable to lay up much 
money, but that when he began teaching he had 
made a rule from which he had never varied : so 
to limit his expenses, that when he drew his quar- 
ter's salary he had no bills to pay out of it, — he 
was always sure to be at least three months ahead. 
The man with even that much start has an advant- 
age usually underestimated over his fellow that is 
living from hand to mouth, or is contracting bills he 
only hojDes to pay. Is it Lowell who says that the 
consciousness of a well-fitting gown gives woman at 
church a serenity that piety cannot fully impart? 
What a well-fitting dress is to the woman, a well-filled 
pocket-book is to the man. He has no tradesmen to 
avoid, no duns to evade, no excuses to make, and, 



72 TEAPHING AS A BUSINESS 

always in the wake of duns and excuses, no transpar- 
ent falsehoods to tell. He can look every man in 
the eye, can buy wliere he chooses, and can have 
what lie wants because ho has disciplined himself to 
want only what he can have. 

To the teacher this attitude is especially import- 
ant for this reason : his power with his trustees 
depends mainly upon his independence. If he is a 
superior teacher he can command a superior posi- 
tion, if not in this school in some other; so if the 
trustees propose to reduce his salary or to hamper 
him by unworthy restrictions, he has only to say to 
them : " Gentlemen, you evidently want a different 
kind of man, and my resignation gives you a chance 
to look liim up." 

I>ut to hud the I'iglit }>lace may require waiting, 
some Aveeks, possibly some months, without employ- 
ment and without salary. With all bills paid and 
money aliead this is easy enough, and is a good 
investment ; but with the bills unpaid and borrow- 
ing })ossibilities exhausted, it is sim})ly impossible. 
The trustees know this, and take advantage of it. 
The teacher knows it, and dares not insist upon 
what he might otherwise safely demand. 

"Put money in thy purse," teacher, and keep it 



THE teacher's COMMERCIAL VALITE 73 

there, some of it. You will never know what it is 
to be ''integer vitae" till you are a quarter's salary 
ahead of all money obligations. 

Emerson somewhere remarks with that practical 
common-sense so curiously allied in him with 
glimpses of the unfathomable, that if you want an 
over-due bill paid, you should not inform your 
debtor that you are in need of money : for when 
you do that you acknowledge yourself in his power, 
and that it is a favor you are begging instead of a 
right you are demanding. Years ago I taught the 
high-school in Meriden, Ct., rattling around in the 
shoes of Col. Homer B. Sprague, who had been 
elected to the Legislature to secure the re-establish- 
ment of the State Normal school. He drew his 
salary and paid half of it to me, and I shall never 
forget the impression that first payment made upon 
me. The treasurer of the board was, I think, a 
shoemaker, a small tradesman making perhaps a 
thousand dollars a year ; and yet because it was 
through his hands the public money was paid he 
fairly patronized Col. Sprague, and someway the 
Colonel's manly form seemed to weazen under it. 
He had to have the money, and the shoemaker 
knew he had to have it, and gloated in that for the 



74 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

moment he was put in the position of master of a 
man whose shoes he was unworthy to cobble. It is 
a position of dependence in which the teacher need 
not and should not stand. His salary should be 
brought to him, and he should accept it as the 
savings-bank accepts the interest on a mortgage. 
This he may insist upon, if he will put himself in 
position not to be dependent upon getting his salary 
on a specific day. The world respects a man with 
capital, and the teacher with his debts paid and 
money in his pocket is a man of capital. 

Character involves Professional as well as Com- 
mercial Honor. A. R. Hope says sadly : 

" We dominies so seldom have a good word to say 
of each other. This is a sad fact, but a fact, never- 
theless, and the reason is clear enough. We are so 
accustomed _ to have our own way and hear our 
own tongues going, that we do not make good 
society for each other. I believe the same rule holds 
good with crowned heads and country parsons. If 
there were a dozen emperors of Abyssinia living and 
ruling within a convenient distance of one another, 
we should find them by no means peaceable neigh- 
bors ; and in the same way, we dominies, so far as 
not bound over by Mrs. Grundy to keep the peace, 



THE teacher's COMMERCIAL VALUE 75 

are given to sneer at the attainments and exertions 
of our brethren*." 

Wlien we not only sneer at our brethren but try to 
supplant them ; when we decry and slander and 
underbid them in our attempt to secure their places 
for ourselves, we deserve to be pilloried for the con- 
tempt of mankind. 

Character further involves scrupulous honor in 
the teacher's relations to his pupils. The best 
teachers are often tempted to unwise familiarity 
with their larger girls. We do not count as a 
teacher the man who could stain such a relation by 
an impure thought ; but we have known serious 
difficulty to arise when the delight one feels in a 
bright, lovable pupil is allowed to drift into senti- 
mental fondness. As Longfellow puts it : 

Came the preceptor, gazing idly round 
Now at the clouds, and now at the green grass. 

And all absorbed in reveries profound 
Of fair Almira in the upper class. 

Children are quick to see and to report, even to 

misreport such weakness as this, and of a sudden 

the teacher's influence is sapped. " If a student 

convince you that you are wrong and he is right," 



* Book about Dominies. 



76 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

says P]merson, " acknowledge it cheerfully, and hug 
hhn." 

That " him " should strictly preserye its gender. 

Jean Paul well adyises : 

" Holily preserye childlike trust, without which 
there can be no education. Neyer forget that the 
little child looks up to you as to a lofty genius, an 
apostle full of reyelatioiLs whom he trusts altogether 
more absolutely than his equals ; and that the lie of 
an apostle destroys the whole moral Avorld." 

Prof. Andrews declares that high character is the 
source of all true authority in the teacher. " One of 
the Greek writers truly said : There is no culture 
from him who does not please. Popularity, indeed, 
often attends what is superficial and spurious. Cater- 
ing to the lower impulses of the student may for a 
time secure fayor ; but sooner or later all worthy 
popularity comes to him who deseryes it. It is but 
another name for authority. Without this the effort 
to impart knowledge will meet but a listless recep- 
tion, and any attempt to influence character will be 
repelled. . . It is this personal authority which 
identifies the school and the teacher. Rugby was 
Arnold and Arnold was Rugby ; while Union Col- 
lege, for half a centuiy, w^as almost synonymous 



THE TEACHKK's COMMERCIAL VALUE 77 

with the name of EHphalet Nott. The success of 
such a teacher rests not on a mere ipse dixit. It is 
not a moral com})ulsion tliat aims to break down 
the student's convictions. It creates, liowever, a pre- 
sumption in a teacher's favor ; it engenders a proper 
and healthful deference, without which there is no 
true culture*." 

I got off tlie train once at a village where there 
were two schools, under two principals. Of two or 
three boys loafing near the station I asked after the 
first. As soon as they found out whom I meant, — 
"Old Tommy?" one of them said, "why he's out 
of town. Vacation." — "And is the other school 
closed?" "0 no, you will find Mr. Brown there." 
It was not the "Old Tommy" and tlie "Mr. 
Brown " alone that showed me how different was 
the influence of the two men, but the very tone of 
the boy's voice changed. He referred to the first 
with a sneer, and drew down his face in speaking 
of the second as ho would if he had been walking 
up to his desk on an errand. Character that mani- 
fests itself like that pays : it has commercial value. 

Health has commercial value. "A nice person," 
says Sydney Smith, " looks clean and cheerful." 

* University Convocation, 1S7S. 



78 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

What a happy hght a clean and cheerful teacher 
throws over the school-room. 

Health involves earnestness and enthusiasm. 

" Dr. Arnold's great power resided in this," says 
Dean Stanley, "that he gave such an intense earn- 
estness to life. Ever}^ pupil was made to feel that 
there was a work for him to do — that his happiness 
as well as his duty lay in doing that work well. 
Hence an indescribable zest was communicated to 
the young man's feelings about life. . . Pupils 
of the most different natures were keenly stimulated. 
None felt that he was left out, or that because he was 
not endowed with large powers of mind tliere was 
no sphere open to him in the honorable j^ursuit of 
usefulness*." 

*' Enthusiasm ! " cries Dr. Mears. " Not in thirty 
years' hearing has that world lost its charm to my 
ears. It speaks of youthful energy and glow and 
ideality ; of the halo of fresh imagination cast about 
the common-places of life and work ; of ardor and 
momentum sweeping down obstacles, and commu- 
nicating itself as a rare magnetism in a wide circle 
of influence t-" ~- 

* Life of Thomas Arnold. 

^ N. T. State Association, 1876, . ^ 



THE teacher's COMMERCIAL VALUE 79 

" Enthusiasm," says Inspector Hughes of Toronto, 
" is well directed energy ; not mere excitement, or 
assumed animation. Enthusiasm must spring from 
a genuine fervent desire for the accomplishment of 
an understood purpose. Enthusiasm in teaching 
must grow from a love for the work through ac- 
quaintance with the subjects to be taught, and a 
deep conviction of the great value of education in 
forming the characters and securing the success of 
his pupils. Some one says, ' Enthusiastic men are 
narrow.' Perhaps they are to a certain extent, but 
narrowing a man's energies to his legitimate work 
is the most essential foundation for his success. 

" The teacher should widen his mental range, and 
concentrate his energies and his emotional nature. 
' Enthusiasm is not a reckless zeal without knowl- 
edge ; neither is it that overplus of feeling or action 
that overdoes tlie work but undoes the worker. But 
it does consist in the combination of a high appre- 
ciation of the importance of your work, and a hearty 
zeal in the accomplishment of that work. Fanati- 
cism is zeal without knowledge ; indifference is no 
zeal whatever ; enthusiasm is zeal tempered by pru- 
dence, modified by knowledge. Indifference chills ; 
enthusiasm warms and quickens. A teacher with- 



80 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

out enthusiasm has no right to be a teacher. He 
cannot be one, iu the truest and broadest sense, 
without it.'" 

But how can there be enthusiasm without health ? 
W. H. Lambert declares : 

" Both experience and observation have taught 
me that teachers as a class are not careful of their 
healtli, .aud do not sufficiently value a good sound 
body as an element contributing to the largest pro- 
fessional success ; that they too often forget that 
cheerfulness, courage, patience, temper, self-control, 
enthusiasm, and all the virtues which are constitu- 
ents of the atmosphere of the child-garden, in which 
are to grow and be developed the human plants 
committed to their care, are the products, very 
largely, of their bodily health. . . Although 
teachers have more holidays, more and longer vaca- 
tions, yet statistics show that no class of people so 
early break down under their work *." 

He specifies, (1) they are too anxious, (2) take too 
little exercise, (3) work too many hours, (4) multi- 
ply details of school management, (5) are too con- 
stantly the pedagogue ; and he adds : 

" The greatest power the teacher can carry into 

* iF. £. Journal of Education, xiii. 267, 



THE TKACHKU'S COMMERCIAL VALUE 81 

the school-room is u joyous, courageous, and enthus- 
iastic disposition, the offspring of health. Bilious- 
ness is as catching as enthusiasm, and the teacher 
always becomes the pupil's barometer, by which the 
latter may foretell the condition of his own mental 
atmosphere. . . A cheerful school is always a 
suQcessful one, and I hold that the success of a 
school is proportioned to the happiness of its pupils. 
Indeed, he who cannot teach a happy school has no 
rioht to teach at all. But how can a teacher be 
happy when a dyspeptic stomach is torturing him 
with its never-ceasiiig pangs ; when a sluggish liver 
is throwing its saffron hues into his face ; when the 
body is trembling under the thumpings of a flabby 
heart ; and when the entire system is reduced under 
a nervous prostration ? " 

Few teachers appreciate the commercial value of 
Neatness. How often a man wonders why he ap- 
plied in vain for a position, when he wore a frayed 
frock coat with greasy lappels, his hair frowsy, his 
boots unpolished, his visible linen made up of paper 
collars and cuffs soiled by a week's travelling. 
With all the testimonials in the world, such a man 
could not expect to be engaged by an intelligent 
board of education. The teacher is an example for 



82 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

his pupils, and no precepts about tidiness could 
undo the effect of such a daily exhibition. 

" It makes a difference in a man's prospects, 
whether he keeps his finger-nails clean," I said to a 
normal principal, the other day. " Yes," he replied 
emphatically, " and whether he keeps his toe-nails 
clean." He was right. A man applying for a 
position does not uncover his feet to prove that he 
is fond of water, but unconsciously he exhibits the 
general character of his personal habits by a hun- 
dred tokens that he can neither assume nor conceal. 

Courtesy has a commercial value of which many 
teachers seem ignorant. " Politeness," says Sydney 
Smith, " is like an air-cushion ; there may be noth- 
ing in it, but it eases the jolts of life wonderfully." 
Gideon F. Thayer tells us : 

" Governor Everett, of Massachusetts, widely 
known as an accomplished gentleman, frequently 
visited a primary school in the cit}^ .of Boston, when 
every pupil evinced by his deportment that he felt 
the influence of the governor's courteous manners, 
even before he spoke ; and on one occasion a little 
pupil said to the teacher, after he had withdrawn, 
'Miss Brown, I always feel just as if I must keep 
bowing, when that gentleman comes into school*.' " 

* Barnard's American Journal of Education, ii.107, 



THE teacher's COMMERCIAL VALUE 83 

There is but one safe basis of courtesy in the 
school-room, and that consists in a genuine Love for 
children. To quote again from AV. H. Lambert : 

" The man who never unbends, who never throws 
off his load of dignity, and who does not instinct- 
ively seek to indulge in playfulness and the unre- 
strained freedom of childhood, cannot be a healthy 
man. The kingdom of heaven comes to us in this 
world only when we are little children. Dr. John- 
son on a frolic, Lord Chatham playing at marbles, 
and Walter Scott romping with his dogs, show us 
how such colossal minds unbend from their great 
tasks. . . Whoever has read Stanley's biography 
of that wonderful man, Dr. Arnold, has discovered 
that the secret of this great teacher's success con- 
sisted in his marvellous sympathy with boy-nature, 
arising from his abounding animal spirits. When, 
said he once to a friend, I cannot run up the library 
stairs three steps at once, I shall think it time to 
leave teaching *." 

" What an amiable litter we have here in this 
kennel of mannerism ! " says another writer ; " black, 
snarling Asperity, red, yelping Dictatorialness, and 
yellow, open-jawed Monopoly. The vital question 

* N^w England Journal of Ediccation, xii.885. 



84 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

for the teacher is, how he may protect himself against 
their too great annoyance, how get the mastery over 
them, how chain to the scliool-room floor this Cer- 
berean brood. 

" We doubtless have all smiled at the credulity 
of that old Sf)anisli cavalier who explored trackless 
waters and ransacked pathless wildernesses to find a 
fount of water that would wash out the unsightli- 
nesses of age, and in their places evoke the graces 
of eternal youth. . . The teacher stands con- 
stantly in the very midst of such a fountain, with 
innumerable jets disporting their aromatic, pellucid, 
effervescent waters on every hand ; and most stupid 
indeed, aye, culpable is he, if he shall not extract 
from their sweet environment the elixir of peren- 
nial youth*." 

In answer to a letter asking how his poetry was 
still as fresh as forty years ago, Longfellow answered 
that ho knew a pear-tree two hundred years old that 
bore as sweet fruit as when it was young, and 
added, " I presume it is because the tree grows a 
little every year." 

And this suggests whose fault it is that Youth has 
commercial value. As a rule the man commands a 

* Qhio Educational Monthly, xxvi,424. 



THE teacher's COMMERCIAL VALUE 85 

new position most readily at thirty, the woman at 
twenty-five — ages at which in other professions their 
success would hardly have begun. It is because 
teachers so often lack sympathy with childhood, so 
often lose the progressiveness of growth in them- 
selves, that this impression so generally exists as to 
the teacher's most valuable period of work. Rous- 
seau says : 

" The teacher of a child should be young, even 
as young as possible, consistent with his having 
attained necessary discretion and sagacity. I would 
have him be himself a child, that he might become 
the companion of his pupil, and gain his confi- 
dence by partaking of his amusements. There are 
not things in common enough between infancy and 
manhood to form a solid attachment at so great a 
distance. Children sometimes caress old men, but 
they never love them." 

It depends on the life one leads whether there are 
things enough in common between himself and 
childhood to permit of companionship. Unhappy 
man, unworthy teacher, who at any age while his 
faculties remain has lost his power of loving and 
being loved by children. 

Scholarship has commercial value. 



86 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

111 this State the present scale of salaries for men 
is dependent upon their education somewhat in the 
following degree. 

The man just 'graduated at college with fair 
scholarship and unblemished character is tolerably 
sure of a ^-jOO position, whatever his other character- 
istics. The demand for teachers at this price, where 
scholarship is the main consideration, is quite equal 
to the supply. 

Beyond this, all depends on the man himself. If 
he is without experience, he will be ranked mainly 
by his personal api)earance. If he is prompt, posi- 
tive, persuasive, he can get a small village school at 
$800, and he may get $1,000 or more. If he has 
marked specialties he may get a department in 
some academy or small college, but usually at a 
salary $200 less than he would receive as principal. 

If he has had successful experience, even in a dis- 
trict school, his lowest limit should be $800, and from 
that upward according to the character of his ex- 
perience. Sometimes he does not get it, but that is 
only on account of undeveloped means of commu- 
nication between schools and teachers. The de- 
mand is equal to the supply at these figures. 

The fresh normal graduate of the classical course 



THE teacher's COMMERCIAL VALUE 87 

stands quite on a level with the inexperienced col- 
lege-graduate. I emphasize the classical depart- 
ment, because our village schools that pay $600 or 
more to a principal demand ability to teach Latin 
and often Greek. Most of them care little about 
having these languages taught, but they feel as if 
they were not getting their money's worth unless 
the principal can teach them if required. Hence 
the folly of the measure introduced into the legis- 
lature last winter, abolishing the study of Greek in 
the normal schools. It would simply close to normal 
graduates the doors of our best union schools, where 
at present the normal schools are doing more than 
anywhere else to justify themselves. 

But though our normal graduates begin on a 
level with our collegians, they do not rise so fast 
with experience. Their practical limit, so far as 
their education helps them, apart from exceptional 
natural ability, is |1,000 a year. Schools that pay 
more than that want a college graduate. This fact 
a great many normal graduates after a little teach- 
ing recognize, and accordingly make the necessary 
sacrifices to secure a college course. This gives us, 
so far as training can do it, the best teachers we 
have, always in demand for superior schools. 



88 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

An exceptional instance in reversed order was 
that of Prof. Burchard, editor of the State Educa- 
tional Journal founded at Saratoga fourteen years ago. 
He was graduated from Yale College first, and then 
took a course in the Oswego Normal. But that was 
pedagogical enterprise too exceptional to last. Like 
the good little boys who die young, he soon gave 
up teaching and went into Colorado banking. 

For experienced teachers capable of carrying 
through the entire course of Regents' advanced 
examinations, of managing a school without fric- 
tion, and of manipulating a board of education 
without the board's finding it out, $1,000 is at 
present a low salary. Villages of more than a 
thousand inhabitants with a school under the Re- 
gents and doing well do not grumble at $1,200, and 
pay from that up to $1,700 or $1,800, as at Ilion 
and Waterville. City ward schools, outside New 
York and Brooklyn, pay usually $1,500, high 
schools $1,500 to $3,000, superintendencies $1,200 
to $4,000. The limit of salary a teacher may ex- 
pect to reach in New York is $2,000. He may 
happen upon one of the bigger places ; — and he 
may pick up a diamond in Broadway : people some- 
times drop them. 



THE teacher's COMMERCIAL VALUE 89 

Of course many of these places, some of the best of 
them, are filled by men with neither normal nor col- 
lege training, who were never graduated anywhere, 
but whose natural fitness and professional progres- 
siveness have enabled them to keep abreast of those 
with greater educational advantages. But there is 
no such man who does not regret that he is not a 
graduate. He knows that his home-made armour 
has cost him dear, and that with all his labor it 
has fissures here and there that gape open at un- 
happy crises. If he had not the discrimination to 
recognize this, he would not have the discrimina- 
tion to hold his place ; and he is always the first to 
urge upon young men the commercial vajue of a 
broad and thorough education. 

These general principles apply also to young 
women, so far as they mean to make teaching a life- 
work. Indeed, there is more definiteness of demand 
for certain training in women than in men teachers. 
There are many schools that make the rule abso- 
lute to employ as assistants in lower grades only 
normal graduates ; and while a few boards of edu- 
cation have a prejudice against them, born of un- 
happy experience, in general it may be said that a 
normal diploma is recognized as the surest single 
proof of fitness. 



90 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

But it is gradually becoming recognized that it 
makes quite a difference whether this diploma be 
from the English or from the classical department, 
not so much from the greater range of studies, as 
from the discipline gained by the extra year of train- 
ing. It is an unhappy fact that many teachers hold 
a normal diploma who cannot spell correctly, who 
do not know the courtesies of correspondence, who 
have not yet obtained that most essential element 
of control of others — the mastery of themselves. 
My experience leads me to think there should be a 
distinction in nomenclature, so that the terms " nor- 
mal graduate" and "normal diploma" shall not 
apply ii]discriminately to a two-, a three-, or a four- 
years' course. 

Within a few years the college-graduate has be- 
come an important factor in the selection of women 
teachers. Not only Vassar and Smith and Well- 
esley, but Cornell and Syracuse and IVIichigan Uni- 
versity are sending out women-graduates to teach. 
These command a higher salary than normal grad- 
uates from the start, and seem likely to assume 
virtual control of the best positions. The demon- 
stration is even more positive than in the case of 
men, that mental discipline is worth paying for ; 



THE teacher's ('( t.MMEKClAL VALUE Hi 

and if it is obtained without sacrifice of health it 
affords a capital likely to pay a liberal dividend. 

It is only within a few years that Pedagogical 
Training has begun to have a recognized commer- 
cial value. The fiict that the normal graduate con- 
tends on terms so nearly equal with the college 
graduate of much broader scholarship shows that 
the normal schools are accomplishing what is much 
their most important work — the awakening of the 
public mind to the fact that teaching is an art the 
principles of which may be learned as the princi- 
ples of other arts are learned. 

The difficulty just now, as in all crude begin- 
nings, is the conceit that comes from partial train- 
ing. Grace C. Bibb says : 

" It is charged that some of these representatives 
of normal schools carry into their work a certain 
dogmatic self assertion, sufficiently unpleasant when 
dignified by sound scholarship and thorough knowl- 
edge of pedagogics, but offensive to the last degree 
when sustained only by very moderate scientific or 
literary attainments and by no particular pedagogic 
skill. Perhaps no one agency has done so much to 
produce a feeling of antagonism towards our schools 
in the minds of people who have no other reason 



92 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

for hostility than the assumption of this class of 
young persons, who are especially obnoxious to the 
veteran teacher and more mildly noxious to other 
sensible people everywhere*." 

But so long as gold is valued for ornaments, it 
will bo imitated Ijy pinchbeck, and the pinchbeck 
will be the heavier and the showier. The worst 
effect of this conceit is that it shuts out further pro- 
gress. 

Take "Methods", for instance; teachers now-a- 
days speak of their Methods as a sort of stock in 
trade, that may be purchased by the dozen and laid 
away in packages. A few years ago it was the 
Oswego Methods. They were l)Ound up in brown 
cloth and sold for fourteen shillings a set. Just 
now it is the Quincy Methods. They are done up 
in blue cloth, at a dollar and a half 

Well, methods, are all right if they are under- 
stood to be .simply a bridge from the mind of tlie 
teacher to the mind of the pupil, and if it is remem- 
bered that as the distances and the embankments 
vary, so must the bridges vary both in size and in 
pattern. The methods given in a book are simply 
suggestions of a few of the infinitely varying appli- 

* Education, i.581. 



THE teacher's COMMERCIAL VALUE 93 

cations of principles. Ytt there are teachers who 
have purchased and memorized a few of these 
methods, and who thiidc pedagogical wisdom will 
die with them. Nay, the most conceited are not the 
normal graduates or the teachers of a single hook, 
but the "self-made" teachers who have such 
confidence in their creator that they have never 
needed either training or books. They have methods 
of their own as rigid as a soldier's leather stock, and 
so satisfactory to them that they have no desire to 
investigate others. 

You have heard of the newly elected Congress- 
man from a back district wdio was invited to his 
first fashionable dinner. He was unaccustomed to 
having his dinner at night, but he did not want to 
spoil his appetite and so went without his usual 
noon meal. The hour was eight o'clock, but it was 
nearly nine before they sat down, and he was fam- 
ished. 

What was his disgust to find the table practically 
empty. There were silver and flowers and elegant 
programmes with outlandish names, but not a scrap 
of anything to eat. He had heard of pinching 
your stomach to array 3'our back, but this was car- 
rying it a little too far. 



94 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

At last, however, the waiter did bring him a plate 
of soup. Now he hated soup — wish-washy stuff: 
give him a good side of roast-beef for such an appe- 
tite as he had. But soup was all there was, and he 
had to make the best of it. So he swallowed it 
down, and as it didn't fill up much he called for 
another plate, and another, and another, wondering 
whether the rest of the guests lived on air. 

At last, however, he liad enough, and he folded 
up his napkin and began to push back his chair. 

" And what do you think ? " he afterwards told 
the story. '' Darn me if they didn't fetch on fish, 
and game, and roast, and boiled, and all the gim- 
cracks you could think on for more'n two hours : 
and there I sot chock full o' sou})." 

Go to a teachers' institute, and you may give 
these teachers the choicest results of modern educa- 
tional science, and after the hour feel that your 
time has been thrown away ; for there the^^'ve sot, 
chock full o' Methods. 



I have named a few of the elements of a teacher's 
commercial value, and I fancy you are already 
asking whether if all these elements be united 
they will command the price. 



THE teacher's COMMERCIAL VALUE J*-") 

Ah ! my friends, it is with teachers as it is with 
diamonds. The rule is simple enough. A flawless 
diamond of a single cg,rat is worth say $100 : of 
two carats, $250 ; of three carats, $500, and so on — 
the value growing rapidly as the size increases. 
And these are not only values but prices. You 
may sell them in the hotel-corridor, at the jeweller's, 
at auction, and they will bring substantially these 
sums. But how about the Kohinoor, the Regent, 
the Princess ? Intrinsically the same rule of increase 
more than holds good, but practically the commer- 
cial value cannot be named because the possible 
purcliasers are so few. There are thousands ready 
to buy your one-, two-, three-carat diamonds, but 
only a queen or a nation has money to invest in a 
Kohinoor ; so it must await a purchaser, and be 
rated at an approximation to its value. All that a 
man hath will he give for a stone like that, but all 
that most men have is not to be mentioned in con- 
nection with it. 

So with teachers. Your eight-hundred dollar 
man may depend with considerable certainty upon 
an eight-hundred dollar place, the thousand-dollar 
places are frequent, and there are many schools 
that pay twelve, fifteen, eighteen hundred. At two 



96 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

thousand, schools become scarce, at twenty-five 
hundred and three thousand one may wait for years 
before he finds liis niche. 

But wlio sliall put a price on the work of William 
Hutchison, who died at Norwich, Conn., a few 
months since ? Just twenty years ago he was prin- 
cipal of the academy at Groton, Mass., at a salary 
of $1,200. He had much sickness in his family, 
he could not live on that amount, and he asked the 
trustees to increase it. A\'hile tliey were assuring 
him, and believing it, that the funds of the institu- 
tion would not permit an increase, a committee 
came up from the Norwich Free Academy, and 
offered him $4,000. Then tlie Groton trustees hast- 
ened to meet, and offered liim $2,000 to stay. But 
their judgment of the value of his services was cor- 
rected too late. He had already made his engage- 
ment, and Lawrence Academy lost a chance it will 
never recover to rank among the first-class fitting- 
schools of New England. 

William Hutchison was a Kohinoor ; and Nor- 
wich got him, not because $4,000 measured his ser- 
vices, but because no other school was then ready 
to offer so large a salary to anybody. But mark 
how the Groton trustees changed their opinion of 



THE teacher's COMMERCIAL VALUE 97 

what they could afford to pay him. The visit of 
the Norwich committee did not increase the value 
of his work, but it gave a new notion of its expres- 
sion in decimal currency. He was the best princi- 
pal the Groton school had ever known, far the best 
it was likely to find ; but its ideas of salary were 
founded on a $1,200 basis. The unprecedented 
competition of a $4,000 school was an earthquake 
that by a single convulsion lifted the financial level 
of these trustees' estimates GOf per cent. 

Let us hope the level was maintained, and that 
such convulsions will be frequent. 

There are signs of progress. 

A month ago, a Long Island trustee wrote to me 
for a principal, and after he had finished the letter, 
added, as a sort of superfluous caution, — as who 
should say, "If it rains you had better bring an 
umbrella " — this postscript : "Of course he must 
hold either a Normal Diploma or a State Certificate." 

Do you mind that? " Of course''' he must hold 
either a Diploma or a State Certificate — in other 
words of course he must be a professional teacher : 
no amateurs or stepping-stoners need apply. 

Now ten years ago who would have believed that 
possible? Thirteen years ago. Dr. Hoose stood 



98 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

before this ver}^ Association, in this very place, and 
shook his mane, and roared that there were to the 
profession of teaching no science, no maxims, no 
code, no status, no prospects. 

And in these years tliere has been such an ad- 
vance in pubhc sentiment that a httle thousand- 
dollar school on Long Island calls for a professional 
teacher as confidently as a man at the restaurant 
calls for chops and tomato sauce. 

I want to say a word for these State Certificates. 
However some of us may diff'er as to the wisdom 
and the justice of some acts of the late State super- 
intendent, I think we shall all agree that he took 
an important step forward when he established this 
system of State examinations. I like to see a col- 
lege-bred union school principal refer with pride to 
his certificate by examination. He has a right to 
be proud of it ; and I tell you, my friends, the day 
is coming when he can't be principal of a union 
school without it. The influence of these examin- 
ations reaches every teacher in the State. I know 
personally, and you all know by experience or ob- 
servation, how the ambition is spreading among 
teachers, old as well as young, to pass this examin- 
ation. Why, I tried it once, myself I went into it 



THE teacher's COMMERCIAL VALUE 99 

rather patronizingly, if I remember aright, but 
before I was half-way through I was mighty glad I 
was on good terms with the examiners. 

We are living in lively times, educationally. 
The contrast between the spirit of a dozen years ago 
and of to-day is amazing. The question was then 
asked with a sneer, "Who ever reads a book on 
education ? " You may ask a long time now before 
you find a teacher who doesn't. Two or three years 
ago, to oblige ( ol. Parker, who lent a copy of the 
book and wrote a preface for it, a publisher I know 
rei)rinted Tate's " Philosophy of Education ". He 
made only a thou.sand copies, and had not faith 
enough in the demand for such a book even to 
stereotype it. But he soon had to put it into type 
again, and he sold more than a thousand of them 
this last month of June alone, mostly in lots of a 
hundred to counties where it had been adopted as a 
''Reading Circle "book. Look at the editions of 
Payne and Fitch and Quick and Currie, written for 
English schools, but reprinted for our own because 
of the appetite suddenly developed for professional 
reading. 

But Mr. President, I am in the position of the 
Irish steward who apologized for so long a letter 
because he had not time to write a shorter one. 



100 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

When I engaged to appear on this occasion, I 
fully intended to have 1113^ paper written out on 
wide-lined sheets, tied with a blue ribbon, with quo- 
tations from the poets, and a lovely peroration. But 
during the last month or two my daily duties in 
unexpected pressure have taken the bit in their 
teeth, and I have had to do, as I once did with a 
four-year-colt — drop the reins, grab her mane, dig 
my feet into her ribs, hang on' like grim death, and 
promise the Almighty all sorts of things if he got 
me to the bottom of tlie hill without breaking my 
neck. 

I am at the bottom of the hill now, thanks to 
your forbearance ; and though I might have pre- 
sented what I had to say more gracefully and more 
completely, I think my main points would have 
been the same, however much time I had had : 
that Character pays ; that Courtesy pa^^s ; that 
Scholarship pays ; that Training pays ; and that 
there is a good time coming for the teacher who 
combines these elements of Commercial Value. 



FITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES 



Doing busiuess without advertising, somebody 
has said, is like winking at a pretty girl in the dark, 
— you know what you are doing, but nobody else 
does. Advertising is a systematic means of inform- 
ing people who want something where they may get 
it. Before you cook a hare you must catch it. Before 
you fit teachers to i)laces you must find them. 

NEED OF ADVERTISING TEACHERS 

This is not so easy as it looks, for teachers are 
not well advertised. The clergyman is advertised 
by his sermons, the physician by his patients, the 
lawyer by his cases ; in each instance the work is 
to a large extent under the public eye and a matter 
of public discussion. But the teacher's work is 
done in the school-room, which few people visit, 
and few of those who visit know how to judge. 
The average community is best satisfied with the 
teacher, as with the stomach, when he does his 
work without attracting attention. 

(101) 



102 tEAriflNG AS A ErSTNESS 

The history of famous teachers iUustrates how 
other teachers might have become famous if they 
had been advertised. Cyrus Peirce was principal 
of the first normal school in the country only be- 
cause Horace Mann happened to visit his little Gape 
Cod village ; and Nicholas Tillinghast would never 
have been appointed at Bridgewater had his private 
school been elsewhere than in Boston. 

SOME METHODS OF ADVERTISING 

Teachers occasionally advertise themselves 
through the newspapers. The Nation now and 
then contains a description of a young man by 
himself, with announcement that those who are 
eager for his services may apply to such-and-such 
an address. I doubt if anybody ever got a place 
that way, partly because schools are not in the habit 
of looking in the advertising columns when they 
want a teacher, and partly because a teacher cannot 
in an advertisement of this sort tell modestly and 
at the same time effectively all that might be said 
of his qualifications. In England, where the sys- 
tem of certification is more complete, so that a 
teacher ma}^ be judged by the credentials he holds, 
the journals contain a good many such advertise- 
ments. In the London Journal of Education for 



FITTING TEAf'HEKS TO PLACES 103 

June there are four pages of advertisements of 
teachers and for teachers ; thus : 

" Wanteci in September, post as non-resident assis- 
tant mistress in girls' school. Subjects English his- 
tory, literature, geogra})hy, grammar, arithmetic, 
junior French, freehand drawing. Good disciplin- 
arian. Several years experience in public school. 
South coast preferred." 

" James Allen's girls' school, East Dulwich Grove, 
S. E., wanted in September second mistress, non- 
resident. Subjects English history and literature, 
good Frencli, elementary mathematics. Must have 
degree of Tripos certificate ; salary £140. Also 
junior form mistress : usual English subjects, ele- 
mentary French and German; physiology; salary 
£100. Very good discipline and experience in 
management of large classes essential for both. 
Apply with full address and copy of testimonials to 
the head mistress not later than June 21." 

But the number of these advertisements is much 
smaller than it used to be because the work is done 
so largely now by the various teachers' agencies, 
such as the Teachers' Guild of Great Britain and 
Ireland, the Scholastic and Transfer Agency, The 
Scholastic, Clerical, and Medical Association, Ltd., 
etc. 



104 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

An expedient sometimes adopted is for a teacher 
to print a circular letter telling what a great man 
he is, and send that around to boards of education 
in general, hoping to strike upon some vacancy. I 
have known this to be tried a good many times but 
never knew of its ])eing successful. I hold such a 
letter in my hand. It is as you see, four quarto 
pages long, and much of it is in nonpareil. I 
make some extracts. 

" P^rom 16 to 18 I was one of the very best stu- 
dents in an excellent ])ublic school. 

" I was very successful, more by reason of my 
natural gifts and ability as a teacher than because 
of my education. 

"As a teacher 1 have always been very successful 
in inspiring my pupils and in imparting inform- 
ation. 

" Personally I am well fitted to teach. I am a 
young man of mature years, tall, well-built, of 
excellent health, of pleasing appearance, personality, 
and address. ... I am well-bred, member of 
one of the best families in Central New Jersey. I 
have always been popular ; was class president, 
editor of the literary magazine," etc. 

Now that man is not as you might think an idiot. 



FITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES 105 

He is really a very good teacher, and he got this 
summer a i)lace at $175 a month in a first-class 
high school. But he got it through a teachers' 
agency, and in asking him to make a})})lication the 
agency advised him not to send that letter. " Tell 
plainly and simply what you have done," it said, 
"and leave it to us to tell how you did it." 

You all remember how suddenly and ingloriously 
the presidency in France of Monsieur Grevy came 
to an end. It was discovered that his son-in-law 
Wilson was selling decorations of the Legion of 
Honor. I happened to be in the city of Tours ten 
years ago when Monsieur Wilson came back to his 
constituents to be vindicated. The town hall was 
literally packed with an excited audience. Monsieur 
Wilson came forward to make the great effort of his 
life. His speech consisted of four words, — " As an 
honest man — " for he got no further. Such shouts 
of derision, such cries of " A bas ! a bas!" arose, 
that his friends soon found it discreet to hustle him 
out of the hall by a back exit. 

ADVERTISING THROUGH A TEACHERS' AGENCY 

There are few occasions when it is desirable to 
say, " I am an honest man." There are no occa- 
sions when it is desirable to say, " I am a well-bred 



106 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

and popular man." These are things that some- 
body else sliould say ; and it is partly because a 
teachers' agency can say these things for a man 
when he cannot say them himself, can get recom- 
mendations that warrant it in saying these things 
for a man when he would not like to apply for them 
himself, that so many teachers find this the medium 
through which a modest man may best present his 
claims. 

The time is j)ast when it was thought humiliating 
to get a place through an agenc3^ The majority of 
teachers holding high positions are or have been 
registered in agencies, including superintendents of 
large cities, the presidents and professors of influ- 
ential colleges. With many of these men and 
women it is a matter of self-respect. No one gets a 
place without some help either from friends or from 
persons interested, and this always involves an 
obligation. For instance, next to the teachers' 
agency, the most potent influence in placing teach- 
ers is the text-book agent. He is usually a man of 
culture, of successful experience as a teacher, of 
good judgment, and is often consulted with benefit 
both by teachers and by school boards ; but no 
teacher ever got a place through a book-agent with- 



rTTTJNTi TEACHERS TO PLACES 107 

out feeling a more or less definite obligation to favor 
his books wlien opportunity offered. Self-respecting 
men and wonien would usually rather pay their 
obligation by a definite commission of five })er cent, 
which ends the transaction, than by an indefinite 
obligation to reciprocate. 

AGENCY WORK IN OTHER BUSINESS 

The value of agency work in other kinds of busi- 
ness is recognized. Most real-estate in cities, for in- 
stance, is rented and bought through agencies. In 
October, 1889, I got into Paris at eight o'clock one 
Sunday night on a through train from Germany, 
with a family of six. The train was long and 
crowded and late. It would take some time to get 
our baggage through the custom house ; so I left it 
in charge of my family while I went down to the 
hotel to make sure that the rooms I had telegraphed 
for were secured. I found the landlord too over- 
worked and worn out to be even fairly apologetic 
that he had no rooms. I went into a large hotel 
near by and asked for c^uarters. The woman in 
charge took down a book, entered my name, and 
asked, " For when ? " 

" For to-night, of course," I replied ; '■ my family 
are at the station." 



108 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

" Either it pleases monsieur to be facetious, or lie 
is ignorant how crowded the city is. In three 
weeks he niiglit liave the rooms, — certainl}- not be- 
fore." 

I hurried Ijaek to the station and incjuired at the 
hotel opposite if any rooms were left. ] was told 
that ever^'thin'g was taken except three servants' 
chambers. I secured these, and while I stood there 
a man rushed in nnd offered double price for them. 
It was perha}»s just as well that my bed Avas hard, 
for it made it easy for me to lie awake all night 
studying the problem of liow to take care of my 
family. 

I solved it. After breakfast I paid the bill, left 
my luggage there, took my family to the Exposition 
grounds, made some necessary arrangements, and 
at noon left tliem sitthig down to lunch. 

I jumped on another omnibus, rode to the Place 
de la Concorde, stepped into tlie first real-estate 
agency under the Continental hotel, got a list of a 
dozen suites of furnished appartments in the riglit 
neighborhood and at a jnice I could afford, visited 
them all, picked out one, paid the rent for a month, 
paid to have an inventory taken, hired the silver 
and linen needed, hired a maid, ordered wood and 



FITTING TEAPHERS TO PLACES 109 

coal and the necessary groceries ; and was back up- 
on the Exposition grounds at four o'clock. At six 
niv family sat down to diinier in its own liome, and 
we liad Ixttcr accommodations for a montli than we 
could have'got at a hotel for four times the money. 
To do this so easil}', so readily, and so surel}^ was 
poseilde only through putting confidence in an hon- 
orable and capable real-estate agency. 

EARLY HISTORY OF TEACHERS' AGENCIES 

Long ago the necessity was recognized of some 
system of registration and ascertainment of qualifi- 
cations by wiiich fit teachers for im})ortant places 
could be found in some other way than by accident. 
In 1835 the American Association for the Supply of 
Teachers w^as established in Philadelphia, with Hor- 
ace Binney for president and several influential 
friends of education among its officers. The consti- 
tution stated that, being impressed with the convic- 
tion that the common schools of our country are 
often inadequately supplied with comj^etent teachers, 
the subscribers associated themselves to facilitate 
"the engagement of teachers of either sex qualified 
to take charge of schools and seminaries in tlieir 
several grades, and also of children in private 
families." 



110 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

It was proposed to do this by registering candi- 
dates and applications for teachers, and whenever 
the wishes of appHcants corresponded putting them 
in communication. I have the circular of this As- 
sociation for 1839, at whicli time John Ludlow, 
D.D., was president, and E. C. Wines one of the 
managers. It states that the Association had been 
in operation four years, during which period the 
extent of its action had been constantly increasing. 
Its first attempts were made as an experiment, and 
its correspondence and other daily business were 
gratuitously attended to by one of the members who 
acted as secretary. Its operations increased to such 
an extent as to require " the unremitting attention 
of a competent individual ". It was determined to 
engage an efficient officer ; and to defray the ex- 
penses it was deemed expedient by the managers 
that every teacher who was successful should give 
to the society 2 J % upon the amount of the first 
year's salary, while the schools and the families 
supplied should contribute the same amount. 

I quote : 

"Teachers applying for situations will state in 
their own handwriting : 

" 1. Place of education and present residence. 



FITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES 111 

''2. Age. 

" 3. Whether married or single, and if married 
as to whether the gentleman and lady [this is the 
language of the modern department store] will 
engage in teaching. 

" 4. Whether the applicant has ever taught ; 
where, and how long. 

" 5. The branches the applicant j^rofesses to teach. 

" 6. The situation desired, whether in an acad- 
emy, school or private family ; as principal or assist- 
ant. 

"7. The location preferred, and within what 
limits the applicant would expect a situation. 

" 8. When and for how long the services of the 
applicant can be secured. 

"9. What amount of compensation is expected 
by the year. 

" 10. Profession or previous employment of appli- 
cants. 

" 11. Miscellaneous remarks. 

"12, It is indispensable that all applicants fur- 
nish written testimonials of their literary attainments 
and character." 

This, it will be seen, covers very nearly the 
ground of the modern teacher's application blank ; 



112 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

while the fee is as now five per cent on the first 
year's salary, thougli now the entire fee is paid by 
the candidate and not half of it by the school. 
How long the Association lasted after its enforce- 
ment of a fee Barnard's Journal of Education (xv:280) 
is unable to state ; but it ends its rejjort of the As- 
sociation by saying : 

" There is a great want, which is still very syste- 
matically supplied by such an agency as that of 
Schermerhorn, Bancroft & Co., — established in 1855, 
and styled the American School Institute." 

In the mean time, however, other attempts had 
been made. The Common School Journal, New 
York's earliest school paper, j^rinted the following in 
Oct., 1839 : 

" To teachers and schools : Teachers can be 
informed of vacant schools by applying at our office, 
and schools desiring teachers can always be sup- 
plied by applying as above. Schools should always 
state the wages, etc., they are able to offer." 

In the Teachers' Advocate, another New York 
journal, there is on Dec. 24, 1847, an advertisement 
of the United States School Agency, established in 
New York by E. IT. Wilcox. It charged institu- 
tions from $2 to $8 for furnishing teachers, and 



FITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES 1 13 

would keep an academy sui)plied with all its teach- 
ers for |lo a year, or a college with all its professors 
for |25 a year. It charged teachers from $1 to |15 
for getting })hices, and recpiired teachers on regis- 
tering to pay the fee, promising to return it if a 
position was not secured, — an ingenious project 
afterwards revived by C. H. Evans & Co., St. Louis, 
Mo. Mr. Wilcox proved to be an irresponsible man, 
for subsequently (iii:249) the editor was obliged to 
announce that ^Ir. Wilcox as agent for that journal 
had wrongfully sent out bills, and that in the future 
all dealings should be with the managers alone. 
From this time the advertisement disappeared. 

The American School Institute however, proved a 
great success. At the time IMr. Schermerhorn's 
business became bankrupt tlu'ough mining specula- 
tion and was sold at auction in 187G, some of his 
friends secured for him the books and name and 
business of the American Institute for the sum of 
$250, and it was continued by him, and after his 
death by his widow. At one time the income was 
said to be $20,000 a year. In plan it was based, 
like most of the modern teachers' agencies, upon 
this American Association for the Supply of Teach- 
ers fovinded in 1839, 



114 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

INFORMATION VS. RECOMMENDATION AGENCIES 

The main distinction among agencies is between 
the information and the recommendation agencies. 
The information agencies depend npon early notifi- 
cation of vacancies. They learn in all ways they 
can where a teacher is likely to be wanted, and then 
notif}^ the teachers on their list who have anywhere 
near the requirements in the hope that some one of 
them may secure the place. Some of them attempt 
nothing more. One agency, established in 1881, 
announced : 

" I offer to teachers desiring employment or 
change of location the readiest means for obtaining 
it. I have ample facilities for learning of vacan- 
cies in all parts of the United States, and by placing 
your interests in my hands you may obtain a desir- 
able position. I send out reports of vacancies every 
few weeks. These reports contain a list of positions 
that have been reported to me as vacant and those 
that I have good reason to believe are vacant. 
When a member sees one or more vacancies that he 
wishes to apply for he writes me for the address of 
the number, which I give at once. He then applies 
for the })lace if he desires to secure it for liiraself. 
I charge an advance fee of one dollar. This must 



FITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES 115 

accompany the application. I charge an additional 
fee of $25 when a position is secured." 

So far as I know this business was not continued 
after the first year, from which I judge the scheme 
did not prove successful, though new attempts on this 
plan are occasionally advertised. At the present 
time there are at least three news-agencies in Chi- 
cago that offer daily reports of vacancies, made up 
from newspaper clippings, at the rate of ten cents a 
day. 

The Assistant Masters' Association of London 
"supplies particulars of vacancies for Assistant 
Masters' notified to the Association by Head Mas- 
ters, and of advertised vacancies collected from all 
sources." It charges members 62| cts. and non- 
members $1.25 for "at least 20 suitable notices".* 

The information agency usually, however, as- 
sumes to do more or less recommending ; and it has 
a good many advantages. Take for instance my 
own State of New York. There are every year about 
one hundred changes of principals in schools paying 
from $1,000 to $1,500, and it may be predicted at 
the beginning of tlie year that most of the one 
hundred new places will be filled from a list of say 

* Education, London, June 5, 1897, 



116 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

two hundred men. If the information agency can 
secure either by registration, or b)^ personal letters 
offering free registration, the names upon its lists of 
all these two hundi-ed men, if it can learn of tliese 
vacancies beforehand, and if it can inform all these 
men of each vacancy before they learn of it else- 
where, it will earn a commission upon the entire one 
hundred places. 

On the other hand suppose the recommendation 
agency has also all these two hundred men u})on its 
list and is asked to fill every one of these one hun- 
dred places ; suppose it recommends three men for 
each place, and supi^ose that, owing to its suj^erior 
facilities for knowing the men and the schools and 
the relative wants of each, it really does select in 
each case the best three men for each place ; yet out 
of all these one hundred places it may not fill a 
single one. Every board may choose some man on 
the agency list, not quite so close a fit as the three 
recommended, but still a very good man for the 
place. 

In fact, it not infrequently happens that it is a 
disadvantage to an agency to have application made 
to it, because specifications are stated which are not 
afterwards insisted upon. Suppose a school writes 



FITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES 117 

for a principal at $1,200, and says, "Give us the 
best man on your list who is married and can speak 
German fluently." The agency carefully selects 
three men with these qualifications, and learns a 
fortnight afterward that the board has elected a 
principal v/ho is not married and knows nothing of 
Gefnuin. The very fact that the board applied to 
it and made these specifications which it did not 
insist upon, prevents the agency from recommend- 
ing the man afterwards elected. 

One development of the information agency is 
especially deplorable. In their anxiety to get early 
information of vacancies some agencies offer five 
dollars to any one who gives them the first word of 
a vacancy they afterwards fill. This has led some 
city superintendents to accept five dollars for each 
teaclier whom they place in their schools, — a form 
of Inibery beneath contempt ; and it has also led 
teachers to play the Paul Pry, seeking after knowl- 
edge of dissatisfaction, if possible magnifying it, 
and thus hel})ing to create a vacancy in order that 
the}^ miij get paid for giving notice of it. Some 
enterprising teachers have even gone so far as to 
send in, without any knowledge concerning them, a 
list of fifty schools, on the general theory that out 



11 A TEACfiING AS A BUSINESS 

of the fifty at least half-a-dozen will change princi- 
pals anyway, and that if any one of these half- 
dozen places is filled by the agency it brings the in- 
formant five dollars. No matter that hundreds of 
teachers are led to write careful letters and send 
copied testimonials with photographs and return 
envelopes, no matter that boards are overwhelmed 
with applications for vacancies that do not exist ; 
there is here a possibility of getting a few dollars 
and it is eagerly seized. I have no hesitation in 
saying that any agency which pays for this kind of 
work is for that reason alone unworthy of confidence. 

THE BEST WAY TO SECURE TEACHERS 

The work of the information agencies has put 
many school boards upon the defensive, so that 
when a vacancy can be anticipated the school board 
goes upon a still-hunt for a new teacher before the 
vacancy is made known. This is undoubtedly the 
best way of securing a teacher. The board can go 
to a recommendation agency, can look over the 
credentials of fifty candidates who would be eligible, 
can narrow the choice down ,to three or four, can 
send a representative to visit these three or four 
teachers in their own schools, can make engagement 
with the teacher whose work is most satisfactory, 



PITTIXa TEACHERS TO PLACES 119 

and need never tell the others why they were visited. 
This is the highest work an agency can do, and the 
best development thus far of methods of securing 
teachers. 

But the recommendation agencies still fail to give 
schools anything like the help they are capable of 
affording because they have not yet overcome some 
of the prejudices that a new enterprise is sure to 
encounter. 

DO AGENCIES CHARGE EXCESSIVE COMMISSIONS? 

For instance, it is felt by a good many teachers 
and boards of education that the commissions ex- 
acted are disproportionate to the service rendered. 
Not infrequently a candidate registers, proves to be 
precisely the man that has been wanted for a particu- 
lar position, and is engaged within 24 hours at a 
salary of $2,000. 

When the devil was sick the devil a monk would be ; 
When the devil got well the devil a monk was he 1 

When a man has suddenly lost his place and 
must get another he is willing to make almost any 
promise to secure it, and while the place is still in 
the future he thinks the $100 he is to pay for get- 
ting it a small amount ; but when he has got it, he 
sometimes grudges giving up his salary for tw^o 



120 TEACHIXn AS A BUSINESS 

weeks to pay for work the manager did in five 
minutes. 

It will be found, however, that even tlie largest 
and most successful agencies are not more highly 
paid than other business as well done. Agency 
work is like diamond-mining ; for the hour in which 
a man finds a diamond he is extravagantly paid, 
but for tlie days he is hunting for diamonds with- 
out finding them his time must be charged up with 
the rest. Agencies have lucky strikes. A single 
call and half a day's work may bring $200 in com- 
missions ; but on the other hand the agency does 
thousands of dollars worth of work without return. 
The book-keeping and correspondence, and the time 
given to study and selection of candidates involve 
great outlay ; a good inany thousands of dollars 
must come back to any large agency before the 
actual running expenses for the year are met. 

It is not strange that a business which seemingly 
requires no capital should prove attractive to many 
idle men and women, so that every year scores of 
agencies are started. But few of them survive. 
They take in some registration fees for a year or 
two, with here and there a commission ; but they 
find that the field is pretty well occupied by agencies 



FITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES 121 

already established and having sources of informa- 
tion and influence which no new agency can com- 
mand, and they soon disappear. You may be 
sure that any recommendation agency which en- 
dures earns every dollar of its income. 

DO AGENCIES MAKE TEACHERS UNEASY? 

Another objection urged is that agencies tend to 
make teachers uneasy and thus promote unneces- 
sary changes. This depends largely upon the 
agency. Just as there are pettifoggers who always 
advise prospective clients to go to law, for the sake 
of the fees, so there are agencies that try to make 
teachers discontented for the sake of placing them 
and their successors. But not all lawyers recom- 
mend litigation. The respectable counsellor-at-law 
in the majority of cases advises the client that, 
whatever his rights in the matter may be, he is not 
unlikely under our imperfect jury system to lose his 
case ; while even if he wins it the game will not be 
worth the candle. So the better class of agencies 
counsel teachers who come to them with sole regard 
to the interest of the teachers themselves, almost 
never advising a teacher to give up a place until 
some other has been secured, and usually advising 
him to remain where he is giving satisfaction and 
his services are appreciated. 



122 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

So when schools consult agencies, as they fre- 
quently do with reference to possible changes, the 
better ao-encies often advise the retention of teachers 
at i)resent employed. 

I know of a case where the principal of one of 
our best normal schools wrote to an agency that he 
was not satisfied with the work of one of his teach- 
ers, but was not sure he could better it ; and unless 
he was certain of improvement he did not want her 
to know that she was even under criticism. The 
agency replied that this same lady was upon its list, 
and that if the principal had come to it for such a 
teacher without telling who he was, the agency 
would liave recommended this lady as the best 
qualified for it. It gave the principal the names of 
three or four others likely to do the same work 
somewhere near as well, and advised him to call 
upon them, see their work in their own schools, 
consider the circumstances under which the work 
would be done in his normal school, and then judge 
for himself whether he was likely to profit l»y the 
change. The 2)rincipal did so, became satisfied that 
his teacher was doing relatively better work than 
he had supposed, and still retains her. She does 
not know to this day that there was ever a thought 



FittiNG TEACHERS TO PLACES 1"23 

of replacing her, aud no one of the three teacliers 
on whom the ])rincipal called ever learned why he 
came to see them. 

This was a case where the agency lost a $50 com- 
mission which it could have secured by giving dif- 
ferent advice ; but the purposes of the agencies that 
endure is not to get fees in isolated instances, but to 
build up a reputation for fair dealing and sound 
advice which makes it seem natural and proper for 
boards of education to consult them. And as the 
better class of lawyers discourage litigation, so the 
better class of agencies discourage changes, and 
recommend them only where there is manifest unfit- 
ness between the candidate and the place. 

As to the candidates the agency itself places, their 
permanence is the corner-stone of its success. The 
proof that a square peg has been found for the 
square hole is that it stays. The agency's interest 
in a candidate does not end when it has got the 
commission. It watches his work ; inquires about 
him ; gives him encouragement, suggestion, warn- 
ing sometimes ; and feels that its own reputation is 
dependent somewhat upon his remaining. It has 
no greater pride than when the continued success of 
a teacher is applauded to say, " We put him there." 



124 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

But do agencies never encourage changes? Yes, 
sometimes. When a teacher is imposed upon, the 
agency protects him. If a teacher worth fifteen 
dolhirs a week can get only eiglit dollars at home 
because the board counts u})on her being afraid to 
give u}) her place, the agency says to her, Resign ; 
the laborer is worthy of his hire and he can get it. 
When trustees surround a principal with such 
restrictions that he cannot work freely, the agency 
says, Resign ; teaching is hard enough when con- 
ditions are favorable ; do not chafe under an ill- 
fitting harness. The connnon-place, the incompe- 
tent, the fault-finding had better hang on to the 
places they happen to have : the agency has no use 
for them. But the man who has proved himself a 
real teacher need submit to no indignity ; he ma}^ 
stand ui)on his manhood, assured that the agency 
will take care of him. 

DO AGENCIES SUPPRESS THE FAULTS OP CANDIDATES ? 

Again it is urged that agencies tell only the good 
things about candidates, suppressing the faults that 
they have discovered. It may be replied in the first 
place that reputable agencies, even if they do not 
always speak of the faults of a candidate, always 
consider them in selecting the candidate for a par- 



FITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES 125 

ticular place. If the candidate is weak in discipline, 
for instance, the agency will recommend him only 
where discipline is not an important feature ; and 
again if the candidate is weak in scholarsliip and 
strong in executive management, it will i)lace him 
where his work will be suijerintendency rather 
than teaching. Any agency of experience knows 
that it costs it more to place one teacher where he 
fails, than to lose a dozen places. 

An agency would be willing to go further than 
this, and state what are the weak points of a can- 
didate if it was properly sustained by boards of 
education ; but as a matter of fact it cannot do this 
because its communications to the board are not 
alwa3^s considered as they should be strictly confi- 
dential. Not infrequently the recommendation of 
the agency is bundled up with the recommendations 
sent by the candidate, and all are returned to 
the candidate together. Now the recommendation 
of the agency usually quotes from the replies from 
those to whom the candidate has referred, and these 
letters are sent under a special guarantee that their 
contents shall not be made known to the candidate, 
whether favorable or not. If then unfavorable 
criticisms made upon the candidate were quoted in 



126 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

the letter of recommendation, and this letter of 
recommendation were returned to the candidate, the 
pledge of secrecy to those to whom the candidate 
referred would be broken. 

But there is a consideration beyond this. It is 
not safe to mention to the average board of educa- 
tion the faults of a candidate. The board knows in 
a general way that all teachers must have faults, 
yet it seldom asks what the faults are or consider 
them in perspective if they are named. Take for 
instance a ver}^ common t3^pe of teacher, and a 
very useful one. Suppose an agency writes to a 
board of education that has applied for a teacher of 
the 8th grade : 

Miss is a hustler, with all that the word im- 
plies. 8he is quick-tempered ; rather coarse ; full 
of life and energy ; able to cope with boys on their 
own ground and get the best of them ; not broad in 
general scholarship, but sound in the subjects she is 
called upon to teach ; and the kind of woman that 
never fails. You would think to see her with her 
children at recess that she was a tomboy, but when 
the bell rings she is mistress of the school : and 
boys whom no other teacher has been able to man- 
age would give Sir Walter Raleigh points by lying 



FITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES 127 

down themselves in the mud for her to walk over 
them if she feared to get her feet wet." 

Now that is a frank descrij)tion of a superior 8th 
grade teacher in a rough school, yet there are almost 
no boards of education that would engage her if 
thus recommended. They would remember that 
she was coarse and quick-tempered ; they would for- 
get that she had the power of making boys swear 
by her. You may select her in your own mind for 
the school, with every point counting, but to get her 
into the school you must say : 

" I take pleasure in recommending Miss . 

She is a lady of great energy and force of cliaracter, 
strong in discipline and always successful." 

The more you go into detail beyond that the less 
likely you are to secure her a position, not because 
you do not want to be frank, but because your ex- 
perience teaches you that it is not safe to be frank. 

Have you ever tried recommending a teacher 
who was lame or deformed, and have you not been 
exasperated to find how deaf that single statement 
makes the employer to all you may say ? One tells 
you coarsely that while he is hiring a teacher he 
thinks he might as well hire a whole one. Another 
remarks that in a school where the teacher limps 



128 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

the scholars will all limp with the same leg. You 
tell him that you would be glad to have your boy 
limp if that unconscious physical imitation were a 
sign that he were imitating in his soul the sweetness 
that struggle and victory have impressed upon that 
teacher's countenance ; but you tell him in vain. 

DO AGENCIES RECOMMEND UNFIT CANDIDATIiS? 

Another and perhaps the most frequent objection 
to agencies is the number of candidates they send, 
and the unfitness of them for the particular ])lace. 

Here is the broad distinction between the infor- 
mation and the recommendation agencies. Still it 
must be • admitted that in this respect even the 
recommendation agency is under constant tempta- 
tion. If it has just the teacher wanted at just the 
salary named, the work is simple ; but every si^ecifi- 
cation reduces the number of available candidates, 
so that few calls can be exactly met. A man comes 
to an agency and says, " I want a teacher." 

" Very well," the manager replies, "I have 10,- 
000 on my list." 

" I want a man teacher." 

"I have 5,000." 

" I want a college graduate." 

''I have 2,500.". 



FITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES 129 

" A graduate of a New England college." 

''I have 400." 

" Pie must have had experience as principal of a 
high school." 

" 1 have 75." 

" Able to speak French fluently." 

i'l have 4." 

" A member of the Baptist church." 

" I have one." 

" Who can be had for $1,000 a year." 

"■ I haven't any." 

Now what is the manager to do ; reply simply 
" I cannot meet your wants " ; or come as near as 
he can to the demands ? Naturally the latter, and 
the number of candidates will be greater in propor- 
tion as it is difficult to approach closely to the speci- 
fications. This approximation is sometimes ex- 
tended to a very wide range. " Have you ever been 
abroad ? " was asked of a woman ; who replied 
hesitatingly, " M^hy, no, not exactly ; but my mother 
had an aunt whose maiden name was French." 

A physician returning from his morning calls 
found written on his slate : 

" Please come to 13 Grape street at once ; my 
wife has the small-pox." 



130 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

The physician informed the board of health, and 
hurried to the house, armed with fumigants ; but 
when he saw the patient he exclaimed to the 
husband : 

" Why this is not small-pox ; she has inflamma- 
tory rheumatism." 

"I know that," he replied, "but I couldn't spell 
rheumatism." 

Now small-pox is as near to inflammatory rheu- 
matism as some teachers are to the requirements of 
the places for which they are recommended. 

Just where to draw the line between teachers 
wholly unqualified and those who might possibly 
be considered is often, even for the careful and re- 
sponsible agency, a difficult problem. 

SPECIFICATION OF NON-ESSENTIALS 

In fact, it may be said in general that the great- 
est obstacle to the entire success of agency work is 
specification of non-essentials. You have all seen 
the formidable blanks that various superintendents 
send out to be filled by prospective candidates. I 
hold in my hand one which I select as a specimen, 
not by any means because it is the longest or most 
minute, but because it has the curious characteristic 
of numerical percentages ; something on the plan 
of John Phcenix, who thought our quantitative 



PITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES 131 

adverbs too indefinite, and would have our novels 
read that on a 72 delightful evening in the 99 
simrkling moonhght, a 67 tall and 93 handsome 
young man was walking with a 79 petite and 100 
charming maiden, etc. 

No Name Age.. Exam 

ined 189... 

Note.— Perfection is represented by 100, and deductions 
are to be made as jn-ovided under each liead. 



1. Figure.— Heiglit ft., ...inches. Weight — 

pounds. 

^~ Heights and weights should correspond as 
follows: 5 feet, 110; 5 feet 2, 120; 5 feet 4, 130; 5 
feet 6, 140 ; 5 feet 8, 150. For every variation of 10 
lbs. from this standard deduct 10. 

Deduct also as follows, filling out blanks when 
deduction is made : Ivound shoulders 50, ; nar- 
row shoulders 30, ; pinched waist 99, ; languid 

or slouchy walk, 50, ; large hands (gloves above 

T's) 20, ; finger nails short to the quick 60, ; 

large feet (shoes above 6's) 30, ; too narrow 

shoes, run over at the sides, 70, ; small heels 

in middle of the foot, 80, ; general bony ap- 
pearance, 40, . 

Extras. Add as follows : Natural erect seat, 

without using back of the chair, 40, ; firm and 

graceful walk, 40, ; small hands (gloves 5's or 

under), 10, ; hands white and plump, 25, — 

small feet (shoes 4 "s or under), 20, ; general neat- 
ness and nattiness, 50, . 

2. Hair.— Deduct as follows : Bangs, 20, . . . ; friz- 
zing of the bangs 30,— . . . ; false hair (if perceptible), 

70, ; straggling behind, 20, ; loose hairs on 

garments, each, 50, . 

Extras. Add for clear, clean parting, 50, ; 

for notable smoothness and neatness, 50, . 

3. Eyes.— Deduct as follows ; shortsightedness, 
20, . ..; evasive glance, 40, . 

Extras. Add for heavy lids and eyebrows, 

30, ; notably clear, calm, straightforward glance, 

100, . 



100 



100 



132 



TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 



4. Nose.— Deduct as follows; Roman, 20, ; 

beaked, CO, ; pu^, 30, ; turn-up, 70, ; sharp- 
pointed, 70, . 

5. ^louTH. — Deduct as follows : If habitually 

open, 90, ; excessively large, 20, ; thin 

pinched lips, 40, ; discontented, scornful ex- 
pression, 80, . 

Eiitras. Add for Cupid 'show, 20, ; red lips, 

20, — — ; appearance of continually hovering on a 
smile, if not affected, 30, . 

6. Voice. — Deduct as follows : Loudness, 40, : 

high pitch, 60, ; habit of confidentially whisper- 
ing what should he said aloud, 8C, . 

7. Teeth— Deduct as follows ; Uncleanly, 90, — ; 

teeth visibly wanting, each, 10, ; disposition to 

show them unnecessarily when handsome, 40, . 

Extras. Add when white, even, complete, 
100, 100. 

8. Chin. — Deduct as follows : Recessive, feeble, 
80, ; sharp-pointed, 30, . 

9. Complexion.— Deduct as follows : Sallow, 20, 

... ; dead, colorless white, 60, ; scrofulous 

blotches, 40, ; any evidence of paint or powder, 

90, . 

10. Attire.— Deduct as follows : Unmatched col- 
ors, 50, ; loud colors or figures, 40, ; greasi- 

ness, especially about the necls, 80, ; faded, es- 
pecially under the armpits, 30, ; soiled, espec- 
ially collar and cuffs, GO, ; tears or rips, if seen 

a second time, 50, ; ragged edge, as to skirt 

of dress, 50, ; general appearance of expensive- 

ness without pleasant effect, 50, . 

Extras. Add for simplicity when attractive, 
80, ; general appearance of getting pleasing re- 
sult by care and good taste at little cost, 100, 



Total. Normal basis 100 on each of 10 points, or 
1000 ; 600 required to pass. Balance, 

It is hereby certified that the candidate has 
passed 



100 



100 



100 



Chairman Examining Committee. 



There is a good deal of judgment in that schedule. 
The points made are generally sound, and the 
marking is as just as could be expected. But the 



r'lTtlNG TEACHERS TO PLACES 133 

difficulty is that in its attention to details it forgets 
the main point. With all tliesc extras a woman 
might stand 1765 on the l)asis of 1000, and yet not 
have the soul of an educated flea. 

GREAT TEACHERS SELDOM FAULTLESS 

Look back over your life as a pu})il, call to mind 
the teacher who did most for you, and ask yourself 
whether that teacher would ever have 'oeen engaged 
under this schedule. I know a man the hairs on 
whose coat-collar alone would on this schedule carry 
him below zero to a point beyond where mercur}'' 
freezes ; and yet who was a great teacher, — a teacher 
who could 2)incli the maker of this schedule between 
his thumb and first finger and laugh at him as 
the king of Brobdingnag did at Gulliver. 

You know I suppose some of the anecdotes about 
Prof. Sylvester, who died not long ago. He was the 
man, who walking by one of the markets of Balti- 
more, and suddenly hitting upon the solution of a 
mathematical problem, pulled a piece of crayon out 
of his pocket and began to cipher on the back flap of 
a buggy that was standing by the curb. The owner 
mounted the buggy and drove off, and Prof. Sylves- 
ter followed, still working at his jjroblem. The 
horse began to trot, Prof. Sylvester still worked at his 



134 tEACHiNG AS A BUSINESS 

problem, and he hung on to the buggy, still cipher- 
ing, until the pace of the horse became too much 
for him, and he was forced, somewhat indignantly, 
to let go. 

His wife had learned that he needed close looking 
after. One day he purchased a new pair of trousers 
without her knowledge. She went into his room 
about nine o'clock the next morning, found his old 
pair hanging over the back of a chair, seized them 
in consternation, pulled on her hat, and at the top 
of her speed rushed with them on her arm for the 
university building. Entering she met one of the 
professors and inquired breathlessly : 

''Oh, Dr. Runkle, have you seen my husband?" 

"Why, yes," he replied, "I just passed him at 
the door of his classroom." 

"And did he have on ?" 

"Why certainly." 

" Thank heaven ! " and she sank upon a bench 
exhausted. 

Now suppose, and it is well within the range of 
possibility, Prof. Sylvester had j^resented himself 
without his trousers to this committee-man, how 
would this committee-man have marked him ? 
And yet, in the perspective of eternity, which 



PITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES 135 

measures men by what they accomplish, Prof. Sylves- 
ter's shadow will obscure a million such dainty 
commi ttee-men . 

THE ESSENTIALNESS OF DYNAMIC FORCE 

The great fault in the selection of teachers to-day 
is failure to recognize the essentialness of dynamic 
force. What we want in the school-room is more 
positive elements. If you buy a horse your first 
question is not how he is shod or groomed, but, Can 
he go ? That is what you buy a horse for. And 
so when you hire a teacher, all these inquiries about 
whether he has a pug nose, or wears a red necktie, 
are subordinate to the great question. Can he teach ? 
Can he give our boys the vigor, the force, the 
manliness, that will make them get somewhere ? 

Do you never realize that if you put into your 
school-room a woman who drags one foot after the 
other as though the day's task were an imposition 
too hard for her, you are lowering the vitality of 
every child in the room ? What 3'ou want to con- 
sider before scholarship, before normal training, 
before experience, and even before good manners, is 
the spirit, the vigor, the sound character, the bright 
and cheerful views of life, that make a woman like 
a ray of sunshine in the school-room. First a 



136 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

woman, then a lady, then as much more as you can 
get ; but while you are marking how short her 
finger nails are cut, and whether her gown is faded 
under the arm-pits, you lose sight of the one thing 
which determines whether she is fit to be put over 
your children. 

THE AGENCY A STOREHOUSE OF INFORMATION 

Wlien this basis of selection is insisted upon the 
importance of the teachers' agency will be more 
generally recognized. A long-established agency 
becomes the store-house of an immense amount of 
knowledge about teachers. There are the registra- 
tion blanks from year to year, the replies from 
references, the conversations about tliem held with 
neighboring teachers, and the various ways in 
which they reveal themselves in their own corres- 
pondence and in interviews, until in the field that it 
covers an agency knows all teachers of prominence 
to an extent that would not be j^ossible except with 
the facilities offered and the care and labor bestowed. 
I cannot in this place dwell upon the wholly un- 
worthy men and sometimes the wholly unworthy 
women, who are still teachers because school 
boards continue to engage them upon first impres- 
sions without looking into their records. There are 



FITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES 137 

at this time in the State prisons of New York tliree 
men who were simultaneously principals of large 
union schools in the State, and there are in other 
States teachers who would be in Slate prison if their 
crimes were detected. 

SQUARE PEGS IN SQUARE HOLES 

But apart from this very serious consideration, 
for some of these men have left trails of iniquity 
behind them that generations will not wipe out, 
there are personal peculiarities of men and women 
with which an agency becomes acquainted and 
which render them especially fitted or especially 
unfitted for certain places. A thoroughbred would 
never be successful before the plow, nor a cart- 
horse upon a race-track. There are thoroughbreds 
and there are cart-horses among teachers, and there 
are places for both. Only a broad and intimate 
knowledge not only of the teacher but also of the 
school will enable an agency to determine where 
the fit is closest. 

For instance, there are differences in the manage- 
ment of schools which make them require entirely 
different teachers. In general it may be said that 
schools as regards assistants are under three kinds 
of control. 



138 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

There are schools, not so maii}^ of them as could 
be desired but still a good mauy, where teachers 
and pupils have so long worked together in harmony 
and good fellowship that the new teacher need only 
be an accurate scholar with the manners of a lady, 
to find herself at once at home, with little other 
care than to prepare her lessons carefully and to fit 
them to the individual pupils of her class. 

In another kind of school each teacher is held 
entirely rcsponsil)le for her own class. She must 
take the pupils as they come to her, no matter what 
the discipline has been in the other rooms, and 
manage them in her own way without calling upon 
the principal for help. 

There are still other schools, and schools under 
principals in some ways strong teachers, where it 
would almost seem as if the principal took delight 
in making difficulties for the teacher, — as if it grati- 
fied him to give her such classes or to surround her 
teaching with such conditions that necessarily the 
best of her care must be given to the discipline. 

Now suppose there comes to an agenc}" a young 
woman just out of college who has known from her 
babyhood only the refinements of life, whose path 
has always been made easy for her, who has hardly 



FITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES 139 

heard a harsh word, and who if a principal should 
speak to her with his hat on would flush as if she 
had been slapped in the face. Suppose such a 
teacher is sent to a school where the principal is 
rugged, uncouth, unsympathetic, strong in his way, 
but accustomed to use his hands as fists. Such a 
teacher will w^ilt under him like a lily in a hail- 
storm. 

THE QUESTION OF DISCIPLINE 

Take for instance the question of discipline. This 
is the young teacher's great test. Her first term 
usually determines whether or not she will rank 
among the successful. Now discipline is almost 
entirely a matter of the point of view. Schools are 
like horses. If a horse finds himself mounted by a 
man whose knees take tight grip, and whose hands 
holds the reins lightly but firmly, after a prance or 
two to assure itself there is no mistake, it is satisfied 
that its rider is able to take care of it under all 
emergencies and it trusts itself to him ; but if the 
rider has to get near a horse-block to mount, wob- 
bles about after he gets on, yanks at the reins, 
grasps the pommel of the saddle, and acts as if he 
expected to be thrown over the horses head, the nag 
is a sorry beast if it disappoints him. 



140 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

Schools like horses enjoy an acknowledged master, 
but they want to be sure he is the master. When 
a young man first enters the school-room it is neces- 
sarily for him something of an exi)eriment. A 
wise superintendent will give him a hint or two 
beforehand, will keep an eye upon his work for the 
first few days, will give a suggestion here and there ; 
and if there is really anything in him will soon 
make him feel so much at home that the experi- 
mental feature disappears. The consciousness comes 
to him that he is master, and he can concentrate 
his attention upon how he shall exert the authority 
that is no longer questioned. 

If I may transgress upon the seriousness of the 
occasion I should like to tell a little stoiy, for three 
reasons : because it is true ; because it illustrates 
what I am saying ; and because it is a joke upon 
one of the former presidents of this Institute. 

When I was a good deal younger and doing some 
teaching myself, it came to my knowdedge that 
Isaac N. Carleton had said some i)leasant things of 
me to a high school committee looking for a princi- 
pal, and that he had recommended me as especially 
■successful in discipline. 1 want to tell you how he 
came to do it. 



FITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES 141 

When Mr. Carleton was principal of the New 
Britain normal school, a teacher of sciences was 
wanted for the spring term, and I was invited to go 
up tliere. The work was principally to teacli chem- 
istry, but the place carried with it the title of vice- 
principal. This was of little consequence, as Mr. 
Carleton managed the school, and as in fact discipline 
was little in evidence ; I never knew a school where 
teachers and pupils all worked together in more 
perfect harmony. 

But one day Mr. Carleton called me into his 
office and said, " Mr. Bardeen, I am going away for 
four or five days." 

I said, " Yes, sir." 

He said " As you are vice-principal I shall leave 
the school in your charge ". 

I said, "Yes, sir." 

He said " I believe everything is all right, except 
one possibility. Three girls," and he named them, 
" have asked permission to go to a party at Mr. 
Smith's on Monday night. I have refused it, but I 
have some reason to think that they intend to go. 
I want you to find out whether they go or not, and 
if they go to discipline them." 

I said, " Yes, sir," 



142 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

Well, I just hoped those girls wouldn't go. They 
were women-grown, and to me, barely out of college, 
that particular embodiment of humanity was still 
formidable. But they went, and Tuesday was a 
troublesome day for me. I heard my classes me- 
chanically with tins problem in the background — 
what am I going to do with those girls ? I spent 
the afternoon getting ready my experiments for the 
next day, and acids and alkalis and retorts were all 
questioned in vain as to what I should do with those 
girls. Finally the 4 o'clock bell rang for prayers 
and I went in to conduct them ; still I did not know 
what to do with those girls. I read the longest 
chapter I could turn to, but I did not find anything 
in it as to what to do with those girls. I picked 
out the longest h3'mn and had every stanza sung, 
but still I did not know what to do with those 
girls. When the singing stopped there was only the 
Lord's prayer between me and those girls. It was 
customary for the principal to lead and the students 
to join in. I started it, still my thought on those 
girls ; but when I got to " Give us this day our 
daily bread ", to my dismay I could not remember 
what came next. My mind had so wandered tliat 
I had lost the connection, and a most painful ])ause 



FITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES 143 

followed. Now, I could be cool enough to go back 
mentally to the beginning and let the momentum 
carry me over the hummock ; but then I was too 
embarrassed to do tliat, and it seemed half an hour 
that the school waited. Finally I reflected that the 
students knew the prayer if I did not, and that the 
moment they heard my voice they would continue 
it ; so I murmured in an indistinct tone, " Tliine 
eartlily sabbath, Lord, we love," and the school 
went on, " Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive 
those who trespass against us." 

All this did not prepare me any better to deal 
with those girls ; but I said in my severest tone that 
Miss so, and Miss so, and Miss so, would retire to 
the principal's room. Two or three students came 
up to the desk to ask questions as they passed out, 
and I detained them as long as I could ; but finally 
the room was vacant and I had to face those girls. 
I went in with my heart in my heels, but to my 
astonishment they were in tears. I straightened 
up. One of them said : 

" Mr. Bardeen, can you ever forgive us? We felt 
guilty all the time we were doing it. Everybody in 
the school has been so kind to us that it was a shame 
to be anything but obedient. If Mr. Carleton had 



144 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

stayed we should not have thought of going. Some- 
how when he went away we felt mischievous, and 
rather wanted to see what you would do with us. 
But you have been so sad and solemn all day that 
we just hated ourselves, and when in the Lord's 
prayer you made that impressive pause before ' For- 
give us our trespasses as we forgive those who tres- 
pass against us ', to show us that j^ou forgave us, we 
broke right down ; and now if you really do forgive 
us we will apologize to Mr. Carleton when he comes 
back, and you may be sure you will never have any 
better scholars in tliis school." 

That was the only case of discipline I had under 
Mr. Carleton, and it was my success in dealing with 
it that led him to recommend me as a disciplinarian. 
I suppose it must go on I'ccord as a, sojnewhat unique 
illustration of the efficacy of })rayer. 

When accidents like these, and most of you can 
give similar instances, determine the success of a 
teacher, what a difference it makes whether his first 
experience is under a kiudh% keen, sympathetic 
superintendent, or under a man whose only thought 
is to hold him to his work and judge him by the 
mistakes which in his immaturity he is sure to 
commit. 



FITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES 145 

THE MODEL SUPERINTENDENT 

There are superinteudeuts, all of us know some of 
them, who are an inspiration to a young teacher, 
and are recognized from the first as friends ; who 
are watchful and ready with the word of warning, 
but who give it so gently and in the midst of so 
much encouragement that it is wholly helpful. 

Some of you must have been teachers under Col. 
Homer B. Sprague. When I was a junior in college 
I was asked to go up to Meriden to take charge of 
the high school of which he was principal while he 
went to the legislature to secure the re-establishment 
of the normal school. He drew $200 a month and 
paid me half of it, and all he did was to sit by my 
chair for an hour or two on three Monday morn- 
ings ; yet he well earned his half of the salary. 
The little hints he gave me were needed, and they 
came in such a kindly way that they encouraged. 
I recollect he said to me one morning, " Are not 
those two girls over there rather noisy?" 

I said, " Yes, but it is just physical exuberance. 
There is not a bit of mischief about them. They 
simply bubble over when they are near each other." 

" Why don't you separate them?" he asked. 



146 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 

"Why," I said, "that would be like punishing 
them, and they do not deserve that." 

He said, " Suppose you look over your school, 
study it a little this week, see what other instances 
there are where the fact that pupils are near each 
other is a disadvantage to both, and then next Mon- 
day reseat the whole school." 

A simple thing that seems to you, but you must 
remember that it was my first term. I reseated the 
school the next Monday on some pretext, and the 
difference was marvellous. It was like Columbus's 
egg on end — easy enough after you know how ; but I 
might have taught for a long while before I thought 
of it. It had not occurre'd to me that the pupils 
must not retain the seats in which I found them 
when I took the school. 

Now it is little hints like that given in such a 
way that build up the teacher. Not the young 
woman alone. Many a young man out of college 
has his whole future determined for him by the 
kind of principal he teaches under the first term. 
He may go where everything is mechanical, and 
fall into the way of doing his work by the week so 
as to get his salary at the end of the month ; or he 
may go where the spirit of the school is so earnest, 



FITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES 147 

its working on lines so broad, that he feels that his 
work is a vocation worthy to call forth his highest 
efforts. This is the kind of school for thorough- 
breds. When these possibilities are recognized it 
does not seem extravagant to say that our most 
important problem is fitting teachers to places. 



INDEX 



PAGE 
..83 

..101 
.. 84 

107 
16 

01 



aboiindinp: animal spirits 

advertisinn; teachers 

age of teaeliers 

agency work in renting houses 

algebra recitation 

amateur vs. professional worlc, 
American Association fur the 

Supply of Teachers 109 

Institute of Instruction -10 

Journal of Education (Harn- 

ard) q 82, 113 

Journal of Education (:. t. 

Louis) q 68 

School Institute 1 13, 1 13 

an experience in discipline 1-11 

Anderson, Martin, q 'M 

Andover Pliillips academy 18 

Andrews, X. Lloyd 9, 32, (i. 70 

Anglo-Saxon expressions 21 

apparel .^5, 81 

applications for places 104 

appointment of teachers 47, 54 

appreciation of other teachers.. ■)4, 74 
Arnold, Thomas 

11,10,19,31,59,76,78,83 

art of education C8 

Artemus Ward, q 10 

artisan vs. artist 68 

artistic not for mere gain 67 

asperity 83 

Assistant Masters' association, 

London 115 

attire 71, 81 



baiting the hook 62 

Barnard's American, Jour., q.82, 1 12 



PAGE 

behind-hand, the little 70 

beixtigos band 68 

best way of securing teachers 118 

Bibb, Grace C, q 91 

biliousness 81 

IJinney, Horace 109 

boards of education. .33, 43, 46, 52, 72 

Bonaparte, Napoleon, q 50 

Bonner, Robert 25 

boolcs on education 99 

born teachers 89 

Brackett, AnnaC, q 68 

Bridgewater normal school 102 

bright and cheerful 135 

Browning, Robert 32 

Buckham, Henry B., q 71 

Burchard, Oscar R 88 

business men compared 49, 55 

relations of the teacher 69 

vs. profession 65 

calling and election 29, 44 

Canning, q 60 

Carleton, Isaac N 140 

Century magazine, q 60 

certification of teachers 41 

changes discouraged 123, 124 

character C9, 100 

source of authority 73 

characteristics vs. character 19 

Chatham, Lord 83 

cheerfulness 80, 81 

chess vs. checJvcrs 64 

child study 62 

childlilce trust 76 

"ciiockfull o' soup " 93 



(149) 



150 



TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 



PAGE 

choosing a profession 37 

church membership 21 

circular letters of aijplication — 10-1 

civil service examinations 26 

Clarke, S. M., q -18 

clean and cheerful 77 

clergymen compared 

-M. -11, 42, Al. 101 

minister's five-dollar bill 70 

clothing 71,81 

Coleridge, q Iti 

college grad uates 86 

vs. normal graduates 87, 91 

commercial honor 611-74 

commissions of tejichers' agen 

cies ll-> 

Common School .Journal (N. Y.) 

*1 ll-^ 

comparison with oilier cMlliugs 

bishops "18 

busiuess-mon J'J, ri5 

clergymen 34, 41, 42, 44, 101 

corporation ofRcers 51 

lawyers 34, 39, 41, 42, 44, 49, 

51,55, 101, 121 

lecturers 61 

overseers 60 

physicians.. 33, 39, 41, 42, 44, 49, 101 

competitive examination 27 

conceit in teachers 91 

congressman's first dinner 93 

consideration in the community. 40 

control in schools 137 

conversation Tio 

Cornell university 90 

corporation officers compared... .".1 

courage 80, ): 1 

courtesj' 82, 100 

Currie's Common School Educa- 
tion 99 

Curtis, George William 26 

dead school a good school 29 

debtor and creditor 73 

deorving others 75 



PAGE 

description of a teacher 126 

development of the child 43 

Dexter, the trolter 25 

diamond-mining 120 

Dickens, Charles, q 57 

dictatorialness 83 

discipline 138 

a (iiu'stion of 139 

an experience in 141 

discrimination in employment 

54, 63,64 

Douai, Adolph, q 50 

Draper, Andrew^ Sloan 11, 27, 33 

draughts, game of 64 

drawing salaries 73 

drifting into teaching 45 

ily namic force essential 135 

dyspeptic stomach 81 

early breaking down 80 

earnestness in life 78 

econoni}' of good teaching . . .56 

edition de luxe 28 

education dynamical 59 

Education (London), q 115 

educational quack 33 

effect of poor teaching 58 

ellicacy of prayer 142 

ICIiot, Charles \\'., q 54, 59 

Kmerson, R. W., q .'9, 60, 73, 75 

empiricism 32 

employers and employed 45 

encouraging changes 125 

Ihiglish advertisements 103 

certification 102 

enthusiasm 78, 79, 80 

—. — drained away 53 

eunuchs, intellectual 51 

Kvans, C. II. &. Co., St. Louis.... 113 

Evarts, Wm. :M 55 

I>-erett, Edward, q 82 

examinations 63 

examiners of teachers 41 

experience as an element of sal- 



INDEX 



151 



PAGE 

familiarity with girl-pupils 75 

faults of candidates 124 

of great men 16, 133 

finger nails clean 83 

Fiti-h's Lectures on Teaching.. . 99 

flabby heart 81 

force 135 

fountain of youth 84 

Gilmour, Neil 98 

girl-puiiils, familiarity with 75 

gown, well-fitting 71 

Gough, John B., q 61 

grappling with difficulties 30 

great teachers not faultless 133 

Greek musician's theory 57 

Grevy, President, fall of 105 

growing teachers 84 

Hall, G. Stanley, q 40 

Hamilton, Gail, q 44 

happy school 81 

health 77-81,135 

hero worship 15 

higher salaries 54 

history of teachers' agencies .... 109 

Hope, A. R., q 74 

Hopkins, ISIark 11 

horses, not harness 60 

Hoose, James H., q 41, 97 

Hughes, James L., q 79 

Hutchison, Wm 16, 96 

" I am a well-bred man " 105 

ideal teacher 9 

immoral teachers 137 

income vs. expenses 71 

independence 33 

of the teacher 72 

In (liana School Journal, q 49 

indispeusability recognized 53 

individual application 61 

influence of courtesy 82 

of teachers 39 

of the poclcetbook 71 

on the pupil 43 



PAGE 

influence upon bad children .59 

information vs. recommendation 

agencies . .114 

inspectors of academies 27 

instruction vs. discipline 59 

integer vitae 73 

integrity 69 

intellectual eunuchs 51 

iron liand in velvet glove 30 

Jacotot's theory .52 

Johns Hopkins university 133 

Johnson, Samuel 83 

joyous disposition 81 

joys of teaching 46 

Judge Hilton's jjark 22 

judges compared 51 

keeping one's place 44 

Koch's cure for consumption 15 

Knott, Eliphalet 77 

Lafayette, General 12, 13 

Lambert, W. H., q 80, 83 

Latin and Greek., 87 

Lawrence academy, Groton 16, 96 

lawyers compared 

34, 39, 41, 42, 44, 49, 51,55, 101, 121 

lecturer compared 61 

licenses of teachers 41 

life tenure 63 

limit of salaries 88 

Lincoln, Abraham 13 

local amateurs in education 35 

luOiuXon Journal of Education, q.l02 

Longfellow, H. W., q 75, 84 

love for children 83 

of children for old men 85 

I^owcll, James Russell, q 71 

Ludlow, John 110 

Macaulay, q 62 

making teachers uneasy 121 

man among men 55 

of capital 73 

of the one talent 32 



152 



TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 



PAGE 

manhood 10, 51 

manliness 135 

Mann, Horace 102 

manner 55, 83, 100 

with girl-pupils 75 

masterful men 29, 140 

masterly inactivity 52 

Hears, John W.,q 78 

mental discipline 90 

Mephistopheles of Coleridge 16 

Meriden, Ct., high school 73, 145 

methods 92 

adapted, not adopted 62 

of advertising 102 

Michigan university 90 

Milne, Wni. J., as a nigger min- 
strel 55 

minimum standard 27 

monopoly 83 

moral supremacy 31 

morality should be stalwart 31 

Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt 57 

mushroom agencies 120 

National Educational associati'n. 40 

Teachers'' Monthly, q 58 

neatness 81 

nervous prostration 81 

New Britain, Ct., normal school. 141 
New England Journal of Educa- 
tion, q 39, 50, 54, 80, 83 

New York civil service commis- 
sion 28 

Common Sc?ioolJournal, q..ll2 

legislative committee, q 57 

State Educational Journal.. 88 

State Teachers' Association, 

15, 41,78 

Teachers' Advocate, q 112 

newspaper advertising 102 

nice persons 77 

non-essentials specified 19, 30 

normal diplomas 90, 97 

graduates 86, 89, 91 

schools, report on, q 57 

vs. college graduates 87, 91 



PAGE 

Norwich, Ct., free academy 96 

not how much but where 64 

what but who 60 

number 6 hat and number 12 
shoes 26 

Ohio Educational Monthly, q..41, 83 

"one stew" 20 

Oswego methods 92 

overseer com pared 60 

Paris house-hunting 107 

Parker, P. W 99 

Pat wanted to be a bishop 48 

patience 80 

paying bills promptly 69 

for favors done 107 

for placing teachers 117 

Payne's Lectures on Teaching... 99 

pedagogical training 91 

pedagogy, chairs of 40 

Peirce, Cyrus 102 

pensioner of the State 50 

pensions 49, 50, 54, 63 

permanence of teachers placed.. 123 

personal influence 76 

personality of the teacher 59 

Phillips Academy, Andover 18 

Phoenix, John, idea of adjectives. 130 

physical deformity 127 

physicians compared 

33, 39, 41, 42, 44, 49, 101 

playfulness in teachers 83 

pocketbook well filled 71 

policy 28 

politeness 82 

position without magnitude 29 

positive elements 31 

principals 77 

and assistants 138 

principles of education 125 

profession of teaching, 40, 41, 65, 97 

professional honor 74-77 

rank 40 

spirit 11 

teacher's attitude 62 



INDEX 



153 



professional traininc: 100 

work 67 

punctuation 23 

pursuit of usefulness 78 

" Put money in thy purse '" 72 

quaolv defined 33 

quarter's salary ahead 7t 

queen's row in teaching 65 

quick perception 59 

sympathy 59 

Quick's Educational Reformers.. 99 
Quincy methods 92 

Raleigh, Sir Walter 126 

ray of sunshine 135 

recitation, faults in 17 

recitations 44, 46 

regents of the university... 19, 27, 32 

examinations 88 

religious character 31 

reseating pupils 145 

respectability of teachers 39 

rest at $3 a night 53 

retiring annuities 54 

rheumatism and small-pox 130 

Richter, Jean Paul, q 62, 76 

Rousseau, .J. J., q 85 

royal and empirical 33 

Rugby school 76 

salaries 38, 47, 56, 86, 95, 100 

savans and donkeys 50 

Schermerhorn, J. W 112, 113 

Scholastic and Transfer Agency. 203 

scholarship 31, 85, 100 

of teachers 11 

school a man or a woman 60 

Schoolmaster (Chicago), q 45, 48 

Scott, Walter 83 

" se nubere'" 24 

self-conceit 54 

self-control 80 

self-made teachers 93 

sentimental fondness 75 



iE PAGE 

sinecurists 63 

sizing up the teacher 131 

skilled worlvmen 34 

slandering other teachers 75 

sluggish liver 81 

Smith college 90 

Smith, Sydney, q 77, 82 

social position 39 

sound character 135 

financial basis 71 

source of authority 76 

specialties of the scientist 14 

specification of non-essentials.. . 

19,30, 116, 130-135 

speech of four words 105 

spelling faulty 21 

Sprague, Homer B 73, 145 

square pegs in square holes 137 

Stanley, Dean, q 78 

State certificates 19, 97, 98 

storehouse of information 136 

study of the class 61 

success proportioned to happi- 
ness 81 

sunshine in the school-room 135 

superintendent and teachers 60 

influence of 144 

superintendent's blanks 130 

supplanting others 75, 117 

Sylvester, Prof 133 

sympathy with boy nature .59, 83 

system in France 60 

limit 61 

worship 60 

Syracuse university 90 

tact 28, 31 

Tate's Philosophy of Education. 99 

Taylor, Samuel Harvey 18 

teacher like the stomach 28, 101 

should be an artist 68 

sure of a living 38 

Teachers' Advocate (X. Y.), q 112 

teachers' agencies, history of 109 

need of 136 



154 



TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 



PAGE 

teachers' iifrencies, work of 106 

Teachers' Ouild of Great Britain 

and Irehmd 103 

teachers impractical 49 

not by choice 45 

teaching as a profession 35 

defined 63 

teni per 80 

tenure of office 51,54, 63, 64 

text-book agents 106 

Thackeray, \Vm. M., q 71 

Thayer, Gideon F. , q 82 

tliird-class talent 47 

Tlii)ni]ison, C. O., q 40 

thoroughbreds 137 

tlu'i'e teachers in State prisons. . .137 

three-handed men 70 

Thring, Edward 11, 19, q. 34 

Tilliughast, >'icholas 102 

underbidding 75 

unfit candidates 128 

Union college 76 

United States school agc^ncy 112 

University convocation, q 77 

unnecessary changes 121 

upstairs three steps at a time 83 



PAGE 

val ue and price 94, 97 

of diamonds 95 

vanity 12 

Vassar college 90 

vigor 135 

vigorous mind needed 59 

'■ \'irtue has gone out of me " 53 

Washington board of edu('ation. 44 

Washington, George 10, 13 

weak points of teachers 125 

weed defined 59 

Wellesley college 90 

what living involves 38 

Whitehall union school 46 

Wilcox, K. H 112 

Willard, Emma 11-15 

Wines, E. C 110 

women college graduates 90 

teachers 89 

work for everyone 78 

young teachers 146 

youth 84 

— in teactiing 48, 63 

zeal and enthusiasm 79 



ADVER-riSEMENTS 



School Bulletin Teachers' Agency 

Not one desirable iil;ii-i.> in lilly is filled iion-;i-<l;iys cxri'iil, dii-rclly ni' 
iiuliriM-tly throuirli the iiiriliuiii <il' a'Teuclicrs" Agency. Nearly mII tciu-liers 
tidkluiK responsible positions are themselves enrolled in some Ajieney and 
Kive their A<;ency immediate information of prospective chanees. Hence 
an outside teacher has no chance to learn of vacancies. Before he hears of 
them they have b(>en filled by candidates notified by the Agency. A pro- 
gressive teacher could afford the annual fe(! for enrolment for the informa- 
tion alone. He ini^dit not care to use it, but it is worth two dollars a year 
to be sure he has missed no opportunities he would like to know of. 

We happen to know as we write tliat a man now princii)al nf a llfi(X) 
school will soon be appointed teacher in a normal school. We are pretty 
sure that a man now <i:''l'iny: $\A()0 will liave the $1600 place. If he gets i"t 
we have our eye on another man now getting $1100 who \\ ill be glad of the 
fl400 place: in <'very case because these niiMi are especially fitted for these 
places and desirous of them. All this in .laniuiry. Now ni'\t .June some 
principal who saves his two dollars by not registering in an .\gency will 
read in the morning newspaper that Principal So-and-so has been atipoint- 
ed to such a chair in such a normal school, and will pack his valise, take 
the train, and hurry off to I'riiicipal So-and-so's present pla<-e to ai)ply for 
his position before anyone else gets there. It will surprise him to learn 
that the vacancy was provided for six months l)(?fore. He has saved his 
two dollars registr.-iiion I'l'e, but he has lost his time, his car-fare, and 
whatever chance he stood of the place. 

The Best Agencies, however, do not depend on information alone. By 
repeated successes, by fair dealing, and through the mfiuence of the teach- 
ers they have placed. "they have won the confidence of many school boards 
and emjjloying principals. 'I'here are hundreds of schools that systemati- 
cally engage all their teachers through .in agency and will not consider 
applications from any other source. 

One year we sent Princi])al Poland, now assistant superintendent in 
New York city, to the .Tersey City high school at ^iiOO: that left a vacancy 
at Hion which we filled by sending I'riiicipal W'inne, now of the Pough- 
kee])sie high scliool. at $1600: that left a v.icancy at Canastota which we 
filled by sending I'rinciiial Ottaway at $1300: that left a vacancy at Amster- 
dam Academy, and so on. 

Bid you ever see people stand in line at the post-olllce waiting for their 
mail? As each one is supplied he goes away, giving place to the next, and 
so there is a continual moving up: the man who keeps his place in the line 
will eventually get to the head. In no profession is there so frequent and 
so rapid movihg-up as in teaching. To get to the top, do your work well 
where you are and keep registered. Presently you will be tile man that fits 
and will be elected, and if you do fit when you get there the Agency will 
keep its eye on you for the ne.xt fit. Try it. 

It is Important, however, not only to register, but to register in the 
Agency most likely to help you. Without reflection upon others it may be 
said with confidence that the School Bulletin Agency is safe and trust- 
worthy. Aaron Gove, superintendent of schools in Denver, Colo., and late 
president of the National Teachers' Association, said in the Colorado 
School Journal for July, 1890: 

" The School Bulletin, edited, owned, and conducted by C. ^V^ Bardeen, 
at Syracuse, N. Y., is an old and reliable school journal, its proprietor is a 

school man and understands his business He is iilso at the head of an 

educational bureau As at present advised, we are suspicious of Bureaus 

unless we know the man at the head." 

"The man at the head " of the School Bulletin Agency makes personal 
selection of every teacher recommended. Send for circulars. 



THE SCHOOL BULLETIN TEACHERS- AcEXCY. 

Positions for Women Teachers. 

The advauoe in the salaries of superior women teachers has been of 
hite years remarkable. Prof. Payne, of Vanderbilt University, wrote to us 
in 1890 for a primary teacher at $1,200, with no duties outside of simply 
teaching a primary class three hours a day. In 1894, we were asked to find 
a woman as college president at salary reaching to $10,000. The difficulty is 
not to find such places: it is to find the women who are sure to succeed in 
such places. Some of the places for women we have filled are as follows: 

At $1,500.— Principiil High School, Des Moines, Ja. 

At $1,400. — Milwaukee Normal, Wis. 

'At $1,200.— Buttalo Normal, Syracuse, JV. Y.; Scrantou, Pa.," Birming- 
ham, Ala.; Davenport,/a.,' Moorhead Normal, Minn.; Colorado Springs, C'o^o. 

At $7,000,— Little Falls, Ou(!onta Normal, Saratoga Springs, Syracuse [3], 
Utica [3], N. Y.; Birmingham, Ala.; Cedar Falls [2], Marshalltown [2], State 
Agricultural College, 7a,,- St. Joseph [2], J/o.,- Grand Forks, iV: Z>.,' Ouray[2], 
Colo.; Helena, Mont.; Cheney Normal [2], Wash. 

At $900.— Auhurn, iV. F.; Plymouth Normal, iV". H.; Florence, Ala.; 
Baton Rouge, La.; West Des Moines, la.; Winona Normal, i1/jrt?i.,' Em- 
poria Normal, Ks.; Omaha, Peru Normal, Neb.; Grand Forks, Mayville, 
N. D.; Colorado Springs, Pueblo, Colo.; Napa, Cal. 

At $800. — Auburn, Binghamton, Elmira, Garden City, Gouverneur. 
Kingston, Newburg [2], New Roohelle [2], Norwich, Potsdam Normal, 
Poughkeepsie, Syracuse [2], Waverly, N. Y; Bennington, Vt.; New Haven 
[2], Ct.; Florence [3], .-l^a.; Campbell, Texas; Clinton [2], Decorah, Coates 
College, la.; Whitewater, Wis.; St. Cloud, St. Peter, Minn.; Grand Junc- 
tion, Ouray, Pueblo [.3], Colo. 

At $700.— Amsterdam Ac, Batavia [3], Catskill, Dunkirk [4], Ellenville, 
Elmira, Fort Plain, Hornellsville, Ithaca, Jamestown, Lyons, Oneonta Nor- 
mal [4], Plattsburgh, Plattsburgh Normal, Port Jervis, Saratoga Springs, 
Watkins, Yonkers, iV. Y.; Naugatuck, South Norwalk [2], Ct.; Bradford, 
Erie, Oil City, Shippensburg Normal, Waverly Youngstown, Pa.; Ishpen- 
ning, Mick.; Normal [2], HI.; St. Cloud, St. Peter, J/j«m. ,' Lincoln [2], Neb.; 
Madison, Yankton, S. D.; Fort Collins, Ks.; Takoma, Wash. 

At $600. — Besides more than 70 places in New York, Deering, Me.; Ben- 
nington, Vt.; Providence Normal, li. I.; Hartford, Norwalk, Ct.; East 
Orange [2J, New Brunswick, N.J.; Erie, Warren, Pa.; Marietta [2], Ga.; 
Florence [.5], Ala.; Owensboro, Ky.; Youngstown, 0.; Adrian, Mich.; 
Jacksonville, HI.; Marshalltown, la.; Fergus Falls, Menominee, St. Cloud, 
St. Peter, Minn.; Portage, Wis.; Lincoln [3], Neb.; Wessington Springs, 
Yankton [6], S. D.; Meeker, Colo.; Salt Lake City, Utah; etc., etc. 

Who get these places ? Born teachers, whether or not they are normal 
or col lesre graduates. Our standard of estimate is, " First a true ivoman, 
thi'u a lady, tlien as much more as we can get." 

C. W. BARDEEN, Proprietor, Syracuse, N. Y. 



-THE SCHOOL BULLETIN TEACHERS' AGENCY. 



New York Principalsliips. 

Whether this Agency is trustworthy may be judged from the fact that it 
has filled the following New York priiicipalships, with aggregate salaries 
exceeding $400,000. 

Adams, Alexander [2], Amenia<S«?»., Amsterdam Ac, Andes [6], Andover, 
Apalachin [2J, Apulia, Attica, Auburn, [2, $1,200 and $2,000J, Ausable Forks. 

Bainbridge, Baldwinsville [3], Batavia [Inst, for the Blind], Bayville, 
Belfast, Binghamton [3], Bouckville, Brasher Falls [2], Brookfield [3J. 

Cambridge [2], Camillus, Canajoharie, Canandaigua, [Union School, 
$1,700, Academy, $2,000], Canastota,, 'Cnnistci) [2], Cauoga [2|, Cape Vincent, 
Carthage, Castile, Catskill f2|. ( 'aU,-ir:ni<.Mis [2|. Cayuga, Chaniplain, Chat- 
ham, Chester, Chittenango [2], Cliui'cliville, Cicero, Cinciiinat us Ac. [2], 
Clayville [2J, Clarence, Collins Centre 15], Constahlcville, (jooper's Plains 
[2], Corinth, Corning [3], Cortland Normal [$2,800], Craigsville, Crown 
Point [2]. 

Dansville, De Ruyter, Dolgeville [3], Deposit [3] Dundee [4], Dunkirk. 

East Bloonifleld, East Randolph, East Springfield .-Ic. [.5], East Syracuse. 
Elbridge, Elizabethtown, Ellenville, Elmira [4], Fabius, Fairfield Sem., Fair 
Haven, Fairport, Farmingdale, Pa3'etteville[2], Fort Edward, Friendship >4c. 

Geddes. Ghent, Gilbertville ,4c. [2], Gloversville [3, $800, $1,300, $2,000], 
Good Ground, Granville [3], Great Neck, Greenville Ac, Groton, Guilford. 

Hamburg, Hammond [2], Hammondsport. Henrietta [2], Hermon, Heuvel- 
ton. Homer, Hudson, Ilion, Islip, Ives-V(S//t. [2],.Tamesvillc> [21. Jasper[2J,.lor- 
dan,.Iordanville [4], Keeseville, Kenwood [3], Kingston [2, $2,500], Kyserike. 

Lafayette [2], Lansingburgh, Lawrenceville Ac. [2], Le Roy, Little Falls 
[2], Little Neck, Liverpool [2], Locke, Lockport [2], Lodi, Lowville, Ly- 
sander [2]. 

Madison, Madrid, Malone, Manlius [2], Manlius Station [2], Mannsville, 
Marathon, Margaretville, Marion [2], Massena, Maryland, Matteawan, Mav- 
ville [2], McGrawville, Medina. Middletown [3], Mohawk [2], Mooers [3], 
Moravia, Morrisville, Munnsville. 

Napanoch [2], Naples, Narrowsburg. Nevyark [2], New Berlin [2], New 
Paltz, Newport, Nicliols, North port [2], North Easton, Nunda, Ogdensburg, 
Olean, Onondaga Valley [2], Oriskany, Ovid [2], Owego. Oxford. 

Painted Post [2], I'almer Falls, Palmyra, Parish, Patterson, Pawling. 
Penn Yan, Peterboro [4], Philmont, Phcehix, Pompey ^(?. [5], Port .Ic^rvis 
[3], Port Henrv, I'ort Leyden [2], Portville, Potsdam Normal [$2,800]. 
Poughkeepsie [2], Pulaski [2]. 

Red Creek, Remsen [3], Rensselaerville ^c. [4], Richfield Springs [2], 
Richmond Hill, Riclnuondville, Rochester Industrial School, Rome [3]. 

Sagapanock, St. .Tohnsvllle [3], Salamanca [3], Salem, Sandy Creek [2], 
Saratoga Si)rings [8]. Saugerties, Sauquoit vie, Savannah [2]. Sherburne [2]. 
Slierrill. Siiliiev, Silver Creek [2], Sinclairville, Smithville, Sm.vrna [2], Sus- 
pension Bridge, So. Glens Falls [2], So. New Berlin [2]. Spencertown [2], 
Stamford, Syracuse [3]. 

Ticonderoga [2], Tioga Centre, Tonawanda [3], Trumansburg, Tucka- 
hoe [2J, Troy, Tully [2]. Unadilla, Union [2], Utica [2]. 

Walden, Walton. Walworth Ac, Warrcnsburg [2], Warsaw, Warwick, 
Washingt()nvill('[2].\Vassaic[2], Waterford [2], Watertown [High], Webster. 
Weedsi)ort. Wellsburg [•!!. W'ellsville, West Cornwall f21,\Vesternville,West 
Hebron, West Leyden. West Troy [2]. West Winfield. Westburv Station [2], 
Westfield, Westport, Whitehall. Whitestown. Whitney's Point [2], Williams- 
town, \Villianisville. Wolcott [2], \Vyoming [2]. 

C. W. BARDEEN, Proprietor, Syracuse, N. Y. 



-THE SCHOOL BULLETIN TEACHERS- AGEXCY.- 



Positions obtained for Men. 

Besides the New York Principalsliips else\vh<M-e named, here are some 
other specimen positions obtained by men throutih this Agency. 

^< $4.000.— Headmaster, St. Paul's School, Garden City, iV". Y. 

At $3, 300.— fiapt, Jersey City, iV. ./. 

At .$.y. 000.— Principals, StateNormal, Providence, E. I.; Blairstown, 3'. J.; 
Superintendent, Lincoln, Neb, 

j4<$2,700.— Assistant Superintendent, Cleveland. 0. 

At $2.500.— Prin. High School, Jersey City, Sup't. Xew Brunswick, ^V. J.; 
Sup't. Blind Asylum, Raleigh, JV. C; President, Normal Institute, Lincoln, 
Neb. 

At $2.000.— \'r\\w\\)a\s. State Normal, Peru, Neb.; High School, Leaven- 
worth, Ks.; Assistants, Brooklyn Boys' High School [3]: Albany Normal: 
President. Coates College, la.; Principal, Preparatory Dep't, Univ. of Colo.; 
Lecturer, University E.xtension, Philadelphia, Pa. 

^< $7, NOO.— Mathematics, Newark, N. J.; Principals, Factoryville, Pa.; 
Davenport, la.; Pueblo, Colo.; Sciences, University of Deseret, Utah. 

.4); $7, 6"00.— Mathematics, Sciences, Oneonta Normal, N. Y. 

At $7,500.— Sup'ts, Norwich Un., Vt.; Liberia, Africa; Yjinkton [2], S. D.; 
Principals, Krie Acad., Pa.; Lincoln, Neb.; Methods, Florence Normal, 
Ala.; Winona Normal, Minn.; Mathematics, Kalamazoo College, Mich.; 
Classics, St. Joseph [2]. iVo.,- University of Deseret, Utah; Sciences, Omaha, 
Neb.; Methods, Emporia Normal, A's. 

At $1,400. — Sciences, Cortland Normal; Classics, Mathematics, Potsdam 
Normal, N. Y.; Principal, Warren, Pa.,- Music, Coates College, /a.; Sup't, 
Hopkinsville, Ky.; Principal, Hiawatha, Ks.; 

At $1,200. — Vice-principal, Salamanca, iV. Y.; Principals, New Haven, 
Vt.; Canton, Oil City, Pa.; Brackett, Texas; Decorah, la.; Fort Lewis, 
Colo.; Assistants, Auburn, Garden City [2], N. Y.; Toledo [2], 0.; State 
Normal, La.; Covington [4], Krj.; Faribault, Minn.; Peru Normal, Univ. of 
Neb., Neb.; Pueblo, Colo. 

.4<$7,000.— Assistants, Oneonta Normal [4], Newburg [2], N. Y; East 
Orange, N. J.; Shamokin, Mansfield Normal, Pa.; Fredericksburg, Va.; 
Lake Forest, 111.; Des Moines, la.; Principals, Hawley, Oil City [2], Pa.: 
Talladega, Ala.; Straight University, La.; Somerset [2], Ky.; Highland 
Park Col., la.; Lincoln, Neb.; Ourayj Meeker, Colo. 

^< $900.— Principals, Rowayton, Ct.; Weehawken, N. J.; Tuscola, 7i/.; 
Assistants. Brooklyn Polytechnic: Binghamton, N.Y.; Blairstown, N. J.; 
Des Moines, la.; Sweet Springs, Mo.; Spokane Falls University, ]Fa«A. 

At $S00.— Assistants, Auburn, Cook Academy [2], Dolgeville [2], Fairfield 
Seminary, Gouverneur, Malone, Polytechnic Institute, Brooklyn, Pulaski 
Academy, iV! Y.; Northfleld. Vt.; East Orange, Highlands, Patterson, Rut- 
gers Grammar School, N. J.; Princeton. Ind.; Des Moines, la.; Menomi- 
nee, Wis.; Canon City, Colo.; Principals, Highlands, N.J.; Youngsville, Pa.; 
Perry, 0.; Apalachicola, Fla. 

.4/; $700. —Assistants, Aurora Academy [4], Canandaigua Acad. [6], Cats- 
kill ["2], Clinton Liberal Institute, Cornwall Military Institute, Delaware Lit- 
erary Institute, Rlmira Free Acad., Lansingburgh Acad., Lowville Acad, [2]. 
Malone, Penn Yan, St. John's Acad., Manlius, Mechanicsvilla Acad., 
Owego, Tonawanda, Utica, ^V. Y.\ Burlington. Northfleld, Vt.; New Provi- 
dence, N. J.; Bradford, Pa.; Russelville, Ala.; Manchester [2], Vt.; For- 
tress Monroe [21. Va.; Searcy College, Ark.; Brackett, Texas; Sweet Springs, 
Mo.; Clinton [3]. la.; Detroit, Michigamme. Mich.; Nebraska City, Neb,; 
Lyndon, Warn.; Principals. Fairfax, Poultney [2], 17. 

C. W. BARDEEN, Proprietor, Syracuse, N. Y. 



-THE SCHOOL BTTLlETm PUliLTCATIONS.- 



The School Bulletin 

AND NEW YORK STATE EDUCATIONAL JOURNAL, 

Established 1874. 24 pages, 9 x 14. $1.00 a year. 

The School Bulletin is one of the five oldest educational journals in 
America, and the only one of them that has been under the same ownership 
and management from the beginninj?. It was the only American School .imir- 
nal which received the gold medal at the Paris Exposition of 1889, and it 
received the highest awai-d offei-ed at the Chicago Exposition of 1893, the di- 
ploma pronouncing it " of the greatest interest and historical value to 
educators of all grades ". It is not filled with " methods " and spoon-food 
for young teachers who want their ideas ready-made, but appeals to super- 
tendents, principals, and all teachers who regard their work as a vocation, 
and who want to look upon it broadly and comprehensively. 

In the feature of educational news it has never had a rival. Its chroni- 
cles of what has happened in New York schools since its establishment are 
unmatched in educational literature, and it has taken note of whatever has 
happened in other States that involved general principles. 

Its Current Topics give a chronicle of w^hat occured during the preced- 
ing month with forcible terseness, and in a perspective that bi'ing tlie im- 
portant events clearly to the front, adding maps wherever necessary. For 
the instruction of classes in this branch, now commonly recognized as essen- 
tial, and for preparation of teachers' examinations, the Current Topics as 
here presented have been declared to be the best anywhere to be found. In 
New York they are of especial value in preparation for the Uniform Exam- 
inations, as the Bulletin is issued every month of the year (not for ten months 
only), at such a date that it will reach New York subscribers just before the 
Uniform Examination of the month, and thus present the news fresh and up 
to date. 

It publishes each month all the Uniform Examination questions and an- 
swers of the preceding month, with all the illustrations in drawing and 
other subjects. It publishes all the questions given at the examinations for 
State Certificates ; all the circulars and legal decisions issued by the De- 
partment of Public Instruction ; and has indeed two Official Departments 
edited and conducted by members of the Department of Public Instruction 
and of the Regents, respectively. 

It is therefore primarily an educational journal for New York teachers, 
and is meant to be a journal no New York teacher can affoi'd to be without. 
But teachers in other States will find it of great service, both for the intrin- 
sic value of its contents, and for the vivid picture it gives of educational 
progress in the Empire State. 

C. W, BAKDEEN, Publisher, Syracuse, N. Y. 



STANDARD TEAVUEUS' LIBEARY, NO. r, 

Bardeeii's Roderick Hume. 

The Story of a New York Teacher. Pp. 31!). Cloth, $1.25 ; niaiiilla, 50 
cts. This is one of the 22 best books for teachers recommended by Chancel- 
lor W. H. Payne in the Nexv Enrjland Journal of Educaiion for Nov., 1893. It 
is also one of the books described by W. M. Griswold in liis "A Descriptive 
List of Novels and Tales dealing with American Country Life." 

Roderick Hume took possession of me, and the book was finished in one 
sitting that lasted beycnd the smallest hour. I have joined t!s crowd in 
your triumphal procession. The characters are as truly painted as any in 
Dickens, and the moral is something that cannot be dodged.— Professor 
Edward North, Hamilton College. 

* My confinement at home gave me an opportunity to read it carefully, 
which I have done with great delight. I can certify that it is true to life. 
I liave had experience in country and village schools as well as in the 
schools of the cities. The picture is true for all of them. I know too well 
how self-interest, jealousy, prejudice, and tlie whole host of meaner mo- 
tives are likely to prevail in tlie management of school affairs anywhere. 
That the people .should know this and yet entrust the management of their 
schools to men who are most likely to be influenced by personal considera- 
tions is strange indeed.— My memory brings to mind an original for every 
portrait you have Avawn.— Andrew J. Rklcoff, former Sup't of Schools, Cleve- 
land, O. 

Teachers cannot fail to be greatly benefited by the reading of the book. 
Roderick's address to his pupils is a compendium of the be.st points in the 
highest kind of school management. Mi.ss Duzenberrie's victory and Vic 
Blarston's closing remarks ought to teach lessons of warning to many 
teachei's wlio are even the most in earnest about their work. Mary Lowe 
is a beautiful model of a teacher, and no one will be surprised that Roder- 
ick should make her his helpmate instead of his assistant. It is a capital 
story, and we recommend it strongly to every Canadian teacher. Each one 
should get a copy for himself, as he will wish to read it more than once. 
— Inspector James Z. Hur/hes, in Canadian School Journal. 

In the columns of The Bulletin, in 1878, appeared a serial story which at- 
tracted the attention of educators in all parts of the country. It was en- 
titled Roderick Iliime. and was professedly '" the story of a New York teach- 
er." It was written with the specific view of portraying certain phases of 
the modern graded school. The narrative was not designed as a satire, 
though a vein of huiiior ran througli it all ; nor was it to Ije taken as an au- 
tobiography, though the author's own experiences were more or less inter- 
woven with it. The interest of the story increased from montli to month, 
and widely extended the reputation of 2'Ite School Bulletin and its editor. 
Letters received from all parts of the country revealed, in fact, a plic- 
nomenal interest in its outcome. * * * Subsequentlyit appeared in book 
form, and it has since held a unique place in American literature. — The 
Schoolmaster in Voniedy and Satire, p. 453. 

C, W. BABDEEN, Publisber, Syracuse, N. Y. 



-STANDARD TEACHERS' LIBRARY, No. 30.- 



Bardeen's Common School Law. 

The revision of 1896, entirely rewritten, not only brings this standard 
text-book up to date, but adds much new matter, including a chapter on 
Rules and Kegulations and the relations of teachers to the trustees and the 
superintendent. It is based on the New York consolidated school law as 
amended to date, but it gives references by page to the latest editions of the 
laws of all the other States and Territories with more than 500 of the latest 
judicial decisions in this country and in Kurope. For .lormal schools and 
training classes the book, of course, is indispensable; and since School 
Law is one of the subjects required in uniform examinations in New York 
of all grades, the book is indispensable to teachers here, as well as without 
rival for the teachers of other States. 

The first thing a teacher wants to know about such a book is whether 
it can be depended upon. The highest authority in the country, the Har- 
vard Law Review, speaks as follows in the number for December, 1896: 

" This admirable book, first published in 1875 and for twenty years the 
only text-book on the subject for general use, has now for the first time 
been entirely rewritten. Iia its present form it is of general interest, and, 
it would seem, of practical necessity to the teacher. Part I, which has to 
do with school oiBcers, is based almost entirely on New York law, but Part 
II, which relates particularly to the teacher, is a safe guid(i throughout the 
country both in school and in court. * * * The author cannot be too 
highly commended in that avoiding the common error of trying to draw 
hard and fast lines, he contents himself with illustrating by copious and apt 
quotation of legal di^cisions the various views possible on disputed points, 
and the application of such rules as admit of definite statement." 

The following are other testimonials from standard legal authorities: 

It seems to us that the work must be invaluable to trustees, as well as 
teachers, because innumerable questions concerning proper school rules, 
their enforcement, the line between proper and improper authority on the 
part of teachers, the subjects of punishment, expulsion, wages, and kindred 
topics, are gone into.— New Jersey Law Journal, Oct., 1896. 

The book contains a very complete tabular analysis of its contents, as 
well as a list of references to Superintendents' Decisions in the State of 
New York, and to statutes of the various States. It will undoubtedly be use- 
ful to both lawyers and teachers.— ^?m. Law Register and Review, Oct., 1896. 

This compact little book has been invaluable to the teacher, school 
ofHcer and lawyer. Of the new edition it is sufficient to say that it will be 
even more useful than former editions.— Xa;icas)!«/' Law Review, Aug. 3, 1896. 

The decisions of the courts in different States are very fully noted and 
cited. The book will prove very useful to the lawyer, as well as a work of 
much importance to the school olFicer and teacher. — American Lawyer, 
Aug., 1896. 

16n-io, pp. 276. Cloth Sl.OO ; Manilla SO ets. 

C, W» B\IlI)li:EN, Publisher, Syracuse, N. Y, 



■STANDARD TEACHERS' LIBRARY, No. 3- 




Pap's Theory and Praclice of Teaclini. 

No other Americau book on teachinK has so much ohiim as this to be 
considori'd a classic. For nearly fifty 
years it lias been rejjarded almost uni- 
versally as the one book the young 
teacher would most profit by. A hun- 
dred thousand teachers have drawn 
help and inspiration from its pages. 

It seems only just to the author of a 
work so successful that his book should 
be printed just as he wrote it. The day 
is past when commentators re-write 
Shakspere. They may annotate and 
explain and conjecture, but they take 
the te.xt as they find it, and print their 
observations in another type. This 
book has been less fortunate. In different editions since Mr. Page's death 
chapters have been added, details have been changed, passages have been 
entirely rewritten. 

This volume goes back to the book that Mr. Page published, and fol- 
lows word for word the text of the only edition he ever authorized. Where 
the times have changed and we in them, references to present conditions 
are given in the notes that follow, which will be found of great value as 
illustrating how different in many respects is the environment of teaching 
now from what it was half a century ago, while yet the teacher's difficul- 
ties are largely the same, and his failure or his success depends upon the 
same fundamental principles. These notes are also in some part explana- 
tory and historical, with portraits of Page, Mann, Colburn, Emerson, Pot- 
ter, Wadsworth, and Olmsted. There are also a biography of Mr. Page and 
a full topical index for review. 

In short this is so much the best edition issued, that even those who al- 
ready have another edition can afl'ord to throw that aside and use this alone. 
The following are among the commendations it has received : 
" This work has so long been recognized as one of the great educational 
classics that comment here is unnecessary, except to say that Jlr. Bar- 
deen's latest edition is especially well printed and has a fine full-page por- 
trait of its great author. — Art Education.'' 

" While it Is one of the oldest books on teaching published in this coun- 
try none of its successors surpass it in its high ideal of the teacher's life 
and work, which is held constantly in view. The true spirit of the teacher 
breathes in every line, and it is a continual source of guidance and inspira- 
tion to all who would realize the most fruitful results in this noble and 
responsible vocation. It should be the first book studied by every teacher, 
and should be his constant companion at all times." — School Forum. 

C. W. BARDEEN, Publisher, Syraquse, N. Y, 



STAXDARI) TKACIIKRS' LIBRARY, No. 7 

DeGrraff's School-Room Griiide. 



What (1 




in Prof. DeGniff's luetliod of i>i-c: 
- — ^ and holds the 



•iflitutioii lh:it so ri'achcs 
vouiil;' ;<';ic'hiT, it, iiii;:lit 
be hard to say : but lie li.-is nrvcr li.id 
his equal as an institute instrueior in 
the inspiration lie <rave : and suiicrin- 
tendents everywlierc a^iree that wlicn; 
'itlier books are bouyhl, and put away, 
the "School-Room Guide" is bouLzht 
and kept on the desk, fcU' daily use. 
Some books are recouiui(ii(l<'(l because 
it is creditable (o own iliern; this is 
recommended liv llmsc who know it 
because it irill /h/jj. it is siunllle.ant 
that this was one of the tliree books 
selected by tin? i;\auiiualion Hoard of 
the State of New York as one of the three ui)oii whirh all Uniforn'i and 
State Examinations in Methods and School ICcouomy should be based for 
the year lSQr>. mid that it ivas unanimously readopted for 1896. 

It is just what its name implies, a real guide to school-room work. — 
Practical Teacher. 

We do not know of any other book that contains so much help for a 
youn;; teacher, or an old one for that matter, as (liis. — Wis. Journal of 
Education. 

The striking point in the work is the practical sense of it. Showy 
methods and visionary schemes get no toleration in these pages.— T/ie 
Independent. 

We cannot say too much in praise of this book. It contains just the 
very hints that the progressive teacher needs every day. We do not think 
that a teacher who loves his work and desires to excel can afford to do 
without DeGraff's Guide. — N. C. Teacher. 

It is not a mere collection of rules and formulas to be followed implicit- 
ly and automatically by every teacher alike, but is rather a series of hints 
and suggestions well calculated to assist the teacher to thinic and desire 
new methods for himself or herself. It were well for our sclmoU if this 
book were used by every teacher. — Pf/ft^ic Opinion. 

This volume is designed to be a practical one. It contains suggestions 
on every subject that comes usually within the work of the common st^hool 
teacher. It discusses the various methods used in tciichin-j; the dilfereiit 
subjects and presents what is thought to be i\w b<'st. Tin' [ilau u -cd in 
treating any given subject is to givg an introduction followed by si' vera! 
lessons, explicit directions as to what is to be done, cautions to be observed 
and results to be obtained. It is just such a manual as every teacher needs. 
—Educational Journal of Va. 

Complete Inde.rjust added. 16mo. i)]). -105. :\Ianilla. 50 cts., ('loth. )?1.50 

C. AV. BARDEEN, Publisher, Syracuse, N. Y. 



-STANDARD TEACHERS' LIBRARY, No. 5. 




Herbert Spencer's Ertucation. 

There is perhaps uo other single book that it is so iiulispensaljle foi- a 
teacher to I'viiow as this. Thus Quiclv 
says of it, in his " Educational Re- 
formers " : 

"There are three Eu<;lishnien who 
have written so well that, as it seems, 
they will be read by Enulish-speaking 
teachers of all time. These are As- 
chani, Locke, and Herbert Sjjencer. If 
a teacher does not know these he is not 
likely to know or care anythinu about 
the literature of education." 

Joseph Payne says, in his " Lec- 
tures " : 

"I agree with Mr. Quick in considering it one of the most important 
works on education in the English language. I strongly recommend any 
of you to get it, and to read it with all possible attention.'' 

Prof. S. G. Williams says, in his "History of Modern Education": 

"But of all that has been written in English, during the present cen- 
tury, probably no pedagogic treatise has attracted more wide-spread atten- 
tion, or has exerted more iutlueuce than Herbert Spencer's 'Education'. 
It is characterized by that cleiirness of exposition and felicity of illustra- 
tion of which Mr. Spencer is so great a master and which never leaves one 
in doubt as to his opinions. Of all the pedagogic works of the century that 
have appeared in English, I am inclined to think that a brief examination 
of this will give us the fairest sample of the nature and direction of peda- 
gogic thought." 

Gilbert Compayre says, with discrimination : 

"Mr. Spencer's essay, then deserves the attention of educators. There 
is scarcely a book in which a clean scent for details comes more agreeably 
to animate a fund of solid arguments, and from which it is more useful to 
extract the substance. However, it must not be read save with precaution. 
The brilliant English thinker sometimes fails in justice and measure, and 
his bold generalizations need to be tested with care." 

It is just here that this edition differs from all others. It gives tlie text 
as published, intact, with side-heads, and a Topical Analysis for Reviews. 
But it adds 29 pages of notes, giving, with references to the text by page, 
the chief criticisms of Compayre, Quick. .Joseph Payne, William II. Payne, 
and S. S. Laurie, thus guarding the young teacher from being misled by 
statements often too positive and broad. There are also numerous bio- 
graphical notes, often accompanied by portraits, and historical notes when 
required, thus making the book one of the best illustrations of the special 
plan and purpose of the Standard Teachers' Library. 

16mo, pp. 331. In Manilla 50 cts., in Cloth «1.00. 

C. W. BARDEEN, Publisher, Syracuse, N. Y. 



-STAXDARD TEACHERS' LIBRARY, NO. U. 




Kein's Outlines of Pedagogics. 

This is :i tiuiisliit ion "f t In- slaiularil German text-book of the Herbartian 
s.ysteni.aiid Hihn only complete niiWion. 
The present discussion over this system 
:iiid its wideninjr adoption mal<e this 
liiiok an absolute necessity to the 
iiacher. Note some commendations: 
"If we mistake not, this work will 
do more for Herbart in America than 
anything that has hitherto appeared. 
It is clear, as translated Herbart has 
not always been : it is iuspirin;"; as few 
translations of modern German peda- 
go^iics have been. Few recent profes- 
sional books deserve so universal an 
American reading."— iV. E. ./. of Ed'n. 
'■ ThefHTMian original of this book was noticed in the Educational Review 
for AiH'il, 1891. and a very favorable judgment passed upon it. In its English 
dress it is heartily welcome. The translation is remarkably good, the 
dillicult subject of technical educational terms being handled with especial 
skill. Mr. Van Liew has also done wisely in including in his version the 
portions of the first edition of the original that were omitted, largely from 
considerations of space, in Dr. Rein's own revised edition. 

" The translator's notes are also helpful. He is particularly happy in his 
discussions, from the Ensilish and .Vmerican pointof view, of concentration 
and co-ordination (pp. 116, I3ii), and of the formal steps of instruction (i)p. 
146, ]r)7). These notes will help the American tea(;her to a clear under- 
standing of th(? essential points in the Herbartian practice. 

" Persons desiring to purchase this book should bear in mind that the edition 
under notice is the authorized one, being brought out in this country by 
arrangement with the English publishers. This warning is necessary, as a 
firm of guerilla pntilishers, whose high notions of morality in education do 
n/)t appear to find application in the field of business, are advertising a 
7'eprint tohich is both mutilated and pirated, though owing to the ^infortu.nate 
condition of our copyright law they cannot be jjrosecuted." — Prof. Nicholas 
Murray Butler, in Educational Review, Jan., 1894. 

'• Although the volume has become familiar to the educational public, I 
wish to exi)ress my appreciation at the appearance in English of this most 
worthy volume. As is claimed, it forms the best introduction to Herbartian 
doctrines which has yet come into my hands. The insight of Dr. Rein is 
penetrating, whih; the lucidity of his pen puts him in easy communication 
with the reader. Indeed, the author is clear in his exposition of Herbart, 
and sound in the few advances which he ventures beyond the master. — 
Prof. E I ward F. Buchner, Yale University. 

IGmo, pp. 333, Cloth, *1.35 ; ManiUa, 50 cts. 

C. AV. BAKDEEX, Publisher, Syracuse, N. Y. 



-THE SCHOOL BULLETIN PUBLICATIONS.- 




Huiitiiigtoii's Unconscious Tuition. 

This is without question the most 
remarlvable address upou teacViint? 
ever written in America. Delivered 
years ago before tlie American Insti- 
tute of Instruction, it has been re- 
printed again and again, and has 
brought help and inspiration to liun- 
dreds of thousands of teachers. B'rom 
a multitude of testimonials we select 
the following : 

" I heard the lecture when first given, 
have read it several times, and have 
given away a good many copies. I 
wish every teacher in the land could 
read it and take in its spirit." — Charles 
Hiitchins, Agent American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. 
We may add that this Board has purchased and sent out to the mission- 
aries all over the world more than a thousand copies, and we have fre- 
quently printed grateful letters from these missionaries expressing the de- 
light and help it gave them. 

"I have had it in mind for a long time to write you a few words -in 
regard to ' Unconscious Tuition ' by Huntington. I wish something might 
be done to bring it to the knowledge of teachers everywhere. It Is the first 
book to put into the hands, head, and heart of every young teacher. I know 
of no gift of equal value to bestow upon a young person undertaking the 
instruction of little children."— X E. Frye, Hyde Park, Mass. 

" We give much of our space this month to Dr. Huntington's grand 
classic. There is probably nothing finer in the whole range of pedagogic 
literature. We trust everyone will read it, and we are sure that many will 
read it more than once."— OAio Educational Monthly. 

" Surely it is a masterpiece. Sometimes when reading or hearing lec- 
tures on our obligations as teachers I have felt like crying out in despair: 
' Lay no more burdens upon us I Are we not already crushed beneath the 
weight of responsibility! ' But this paper, while it reveals with singular 
vividness the duty resting upon us, yet carries with it such a healthful and 
strengthening power that it inspires determination and hope. It presents 
a most exalted ideal, and neglects not to speak of the means by which it is 
attained. It brings commendation and hope to the few who are worthy, 
and has also a word of encouragement for the most of vis who have made 
as yet little progress. Such words stir the soul to its depths with its un- 
voiced thoughts which breathe forth a holy, sacred influence that is uplifting 
and purifying. At such times our eyes are opened and we see more clearly 
than ever before that character is the one thing that shall endure." — E. M. 
N., in Ohio Educational Monthly. 

Paper, 16mo, pp. 45, 15 cts. Also the second of four monographs in 
"The Teacher's Mentor", cloth, pp. 274, $1.00. 

C. W. BAKDEEN, Publisher, Syracuse, N. Y. 



-STANDARD TEACHERS' LIBRARY, No. 35- 




Quick's Educational Eeformers. 

malcos Uiis tliu most, iMiUTtiiininii; of books for 
teucli(!rs. Dr. Win. T. IlaiTis says : "I 
have called this book of Mr. Quick the 
most valuable history of education in 
our niother-tonsue." We are glad to 
present it in new dress, worthy of its 
merits. 

This U3W edition is a careful reprint 
of the original London edition with the 
followinfr additions: 

(1) Mr. Quick's Pedasosical Auto- 
biography, written for the Educational 
Review, and used here by permission.. 

(2) The chapter on Froebel, written 
by iNIr. Quick for the Kncyclopffidia Britannica. 

(3) Portraits, including the following: 

Arnold Goethe Montaigne 

Aschara .Tacotot Pestalozzi 

Basedow Kant Quick 

Colet Lavater Rousseau 

Comenius Locke Spencer 

Fellenburg Loyola Sturm 

Froebel Milton Tobler 

(4) Illustrations, including the following: 

Facsimile page from one of Mr. Quick's letters. Facsimile page from 
one of Pestalo/.zi's manuscripts, with notes in the handwriting of Ramsauer, 
Niederer, Tobler, and Kriisi. Janua Linguarum, 3 facsimile pages. Orbis 
Pictus, 2 facsimile pages. Pestalozzi's birth-place at Zurich. N'iews of 
Stanz, Burgdorf, Yverdun, and the schoolhouse at Birr, with Pestalozzi's 
Memorial. The well-known picture of Ascham and Lady Jane Grey. 

(5) Translations of all the passages in French, German, Latin, and 
Greek, with which the book abounds. 

These added translations are put at the bottom of the page and are 
indicated by numbers. In the chapter on Rousseau, tlie quotations in 
French mii e nearly as much matter as the F,nglish, so that the chapter 
might well serve for an exercise in learning French l)y jiarallel translation, 
after the methods of Ratich, Locke, or Jacotot. 

(6) Side-heads, giving the substance of the paragraph. 

(7) Additional notes, always in brackets. 

(8) An index much extended. 

Ifinio, pp. 420, Price postpaid in Manilla 50 cts. ; in Cloth, $1.00. 

C. W. BAKDEEN, Publisher, Syracuse, N. Y. 



